Mouse Anti-Procalcitonin monoclonal antibody, clone PCT

Introduction: Febrile neutropenia is a common cause in morbidity and mortality during treatment of hematological neoplasms. Methods: Subjects included all cases admitted under hematology department with febrile neutropenia from February to June 2018. Each febrile episode was investigated by standard investigations (Blood culture, Chest x ray etc.); Procalcitonin (PCT) and c reactive protein (CRP) was sent at fever onset 0, 24, 48 h, day 7 and day 14. Results: Data was analyzed for 52 febrile episodes in 50 patients. PCT cut off value at 24 h of <= 1.2 ng/ml had a sensitivity and specificity of 62.5% and 87.5% for discriminating Invasive fungal infection (IFI) and Microbiologically documented infection (MDI) (p = 0.033). PCT had a negative predictive value of 70% for the diagnosis of IFI as compared to MDI. CRP cut off> 160 mg/dl at 48 h was suggestive of fever due to fungal infection with a sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 48%, PPV of 33.3% and NPV of 100%. CRP at 24 and 48 h of fever was useful to distinguish non-infectious causes of fever from infectious causes. Conclusion: PCT at 24 h and CRP at 48 h was useful in identifying fungal infection. CRP was a better marker when compared to PCT for identifying disease fever.

Copper (Cu) with variable weight loading (5-15 wt%) were doped to magnetite nanoparticles (MNPs) via a simple electrochemical method. The physicochemical properties of these catalyst were characterized with XRD, VSM, BET, FTIR and TEM. The nature of Cu distribution was elucidated with relative intensity ratio in XRD and Rietveld refinement. These two methods confirmed that Cu was substituted to iron in octahedral and tetrahedral sites. The presence of Cu in these two sites, enhanced the photodegradation towards Paracetamol (PCT) drastically. The existence of Cu also assisted with the redox reaction between Fe3+/Fe2+ and Cu2+/Cu+ . The optimum degradation was achieved when Cu equidistantly doped to octahedral and tetrahedral sites. Further optimization was then conducted by response surface methodology (RSM) with central composite design (CCD) model for PCT degradation. RSM revealed that the experimental value of 32.5 x 10(-2) mg (L. min)(-1) was close to predicted value of 32.02 x 10(-2) mg (L. min)(-1 )with only 1.47% error for degradation of PCT using 0.53 g L-1 of the catalyst at pH 9.56 with 9.2% Cu/MNPs.