Microenvironmental conditions control tumorigenesis and biomimetic culture systems that allow for in vitro and in vivo tumor modeling may greatly aid studies of cancer cells' dependency on these conditions. We engineered three-dimensional (3D) human tumor models using carcinoma cells in polymeric scaffolds that recreated microenvironmental characteristics representative of tumors in vivo. Strikingly, the angiogenic characteristics of tumor cells were dramatically altered upon 3D culture within this system, and corresponded much more closely to tumors formed in vivo. Cells in this model were also less sensitive to chemotherapy and yielded tumors with enhanced malignant potential. We assessed the broad relevance of these findings with 3D culture of other tumor cell lines in this same model, comparison with standard 3D Matrigel culture and in vivo experiments. This new biomimetic model may provide a broadly applicable 3D culture system to study the effect of microenvironmental conditions on tumor malignancy in vitro and in vivo.

A single dose of oral Dex (0.6 mg/kg) is no worse than 5 days of twice-daily prednisolone (1 mg/kg per dose) in the management of children with mild to moderate asthma.

The results from this study suggest that highly contextualised learning environments may not be uniformly advantageous for instruction and may lead to ineffective learning by increasing extraneous cognitive load in novice learners.

High-fidelity simulation in health professional programs helps educators and students meet the challenges of increasingly complex clinical practice settings. Simulation has been used primarily to train nursing students either in interprofessional teams or within their respective nursing training levels. However, students' experiences of learning alongside others in different levels or years of the nursing program have not been explored. BSN students (N = 48) were placed in intraprofessional teams (i.e., one student from each nursing level) to manage acute pediatric and adult simulation scenarios. Students were instructed to manage the clinical scenario based on their level of clinical competence and education. Following debriefing, students responded to a satisfaction survey regarding their simulation experiences and their perceptions of learning within an intraprofessional nursing team. Project results suggest that intraprofessional educational experiences provide rich learning opportunities for both third-year and fourth-year nursing students. In addition, simulation provides a context within which to support intraprofessional nursing student education.