urbation that shape sexual arousal may not be conducive to arousal or functioning with a partner
- Assessment if one is viewing sexuality as a “performance” and is orgasm a focused rather than an embodied experience where arousal and erections are free to ebb, flow, wax or wane
- Identify relational communication problems
There are common conceptualizations about male sexuality, that often add unhelpful pressure that arises from beliefs about the importance of the sustained male erection. Sex therapy can help clients work on identifying and overcoming said misconceptions and pressures.A newly established canine NK-type cell line and its cytotoxic properties.

We established a canine NK-type cell line called CNK-89 derived from a dog with NK cell neoplasia. Immunophenotyping analysis showed positive staining for CD5, CD8, CD45, CD56, CD79a and NKp46, while negative for CD3, CD4, CD14, CD20, CD21, CD34, Thy1, IgG, IgM and MHCII. PCR analysis revealed the presence of CD56, NKG2D, NKp30, NKp44, NKp46 and perforin, but the absence of CD16, Ly49 and granzyme B mRNA. Treating CNK-89 cells with IL-2 did not change the expression of activating receptors, TNFα and IFNγ secretion and cytotoxic activity, however, treatment with IL-12 alone or in combinations with IL-15, IL-18 and IL-21 caused an increase in granzyme B and CD16 mRNA, IFNγ secretion and cytotoxic properties of the CNK-89 cell line. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.WHAT’S DOWN: Best Buy Co. says its second-quarter profit slid 19 percent, falling to $202 million, or 48 cents per share, for the three months ending Aug. 30.
WHAT’S UP: Despite the falling profit, revenue grew 12 percent to $9.8 billion as shoppers bought more flat-panel TVs, laptops and cell phones. And same-store sales, or sales at established stores, increased 4.2 percent.
WHAT’S NEXT: The company says it plans to cut costs for things like nonessential travel while targeting its advertising as it tries to hit its full-year targets.1. What is KerusCloud?
KerusCloud is a uniquely powerful and innovative study simulation software platform that ensures clinical studies are suitably designed statistically from the outset to maximise their chances of success. To do this, KerusCloud creates highly realistic synthetic data sets (virtual populations) which provide the basis for generating thousands of study simulations that accurately mimic the complexity of real clinical studies. This allows researchers to examine the performance of a wide variety of study design and analysis options in silico, in minutes and choose the best options for real studies going forward.
2. Why has KerusCloud been developed?
KerusCloud has been designed by statisticians at Exploristics with many years experience of clinical development in the Pharmaceutical industry to address the problem that current study design tools do not adequately support the designs of modern clinical trials that are generating increasingly complex clinical, demographic and biological data.
New approaches, such as Precision Medicine, have led to clinical trials that need to answer multiple questions such as understanding the association of risk factors on treatment response and identifying subgroups of patients that derive benefits of treatment. However, the majority of design tools assume that only one factor influences variability in treatment response (eg. Treatment) and it is common practice to make simplistic, fixed assumptions about the nature of the relationship between that factor and response. This traditional approach to designing studies is statistically crude and fundamentally flawed as it does not adequately account for the multiple sources of uncertainty in real studies nor does it make best use of available data and the skills of the statistician who are often brought into the design approach at a late stage of clinical protocol development.
Consequently, Exploristics has built KerusCloud, a software platform that can handle the many sources of uncertainty that should now be considered when designing a clinical study. This powerful and versatile simulation platform gives statisticians an invaluable statistical tool with which to engage much earlier in clinical protocol development and de-risk clinical trials from the outset. KerusCloud does this by offering a more efficient data-driven approach to study design that can account for the complexity of modern clinical trials and ensure that fewer studies will fail for avoidable statistical reasons. With KerusCloud in their toolbox, statisticians can play a central role in improving study design at every phase of clinical development, driving down historically high attrition rates to accelerate the rate at which new medicines, diagnostics and devices reach those with unmet clinical need and improve the return on R&D investment in the process.
3. How is KerusCloud different from other commercially available software?
KerusCloud is the only statistical software available that can evaluate multiple aspects of clinical trial design simultaneously. It is also the only cloud-based simulation tool that harnesses the power of cloud computing to speed up simulation. This means that using KerusCloud ensures that the best combination of study design and analysis options can be assessed and selected for real studies in minutes, so that they can achieve statistically and clinically meaningful outcomes. No other commercial software can process and simulate the complexity of multiple correlated study variables and outcomes as KerusCloud does. Other software can simulate data and perform tests, but this is generally limited to either simulation of single variables or multiple independent variables which only crudely reflect real clinical studies. This unique ability to process multiple correlated variables and outcomes as well as subgroups and missing data means that studies simulated with KerusCloud are exceptionally realistic and informative as they closely mimic the complexity of biological, clinical and real-world data.
4. Why are these unique capabilities useful?
Using this highly realistic virtual data and its intensive processing power, KerusCloud can run thousands of Monte Carlo simulations in minutes to evaluate the probability of success of many, varied study designs and analysis options to achieve study or programme objectives. KerusCloud has increased processing power with up to 96 parallel cores for a single simulation and an intelligent process management system which boosts processing power as needed, so even the most complex simulations can be run in minutes and the results reviewed in real time. KerusCloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), where the Kerus statistics engine benefits from the scalability and performance of the cloud. This allows KerusCloud to produce results in minutes, even for large and computationally intensive simulations.
5. How else is KerusCloud uniquely useful?
With clear state of the art graphical displays and streamlined workflows, KerusCloud facilitates earlier engagement between statisticians and clinical R&D teams in the study design process, allowing the impact of different design and analysis choices to be simply visualised, compared and interpreted by the whole team in the process of study optimisation. In this way, KerusCloud enables all researchers to bring statistical considerations into the foundation of any development project so that clinical studies are fully optimised in silico to increase real study success rates.
6. Where does the data come from for generating virtual study populations?
KerusCloud offers unparalleled realism with the virtual populations it generates. The real data used to create these synthetic data sets comes from multiple sources, including the scientific literature, patient-level data and expert opinion. Patient-level data can be automatically imported into the platform via our innovative Kerus Data importer (KDi) technology in the form of summary statistics from existing patient-level data sets. Many users of KerusCloud have access to their own internal patient databases. Alternatively, Exploristics sources its patient-level data from a range of databases and exclusive partnerships developed between our Data Strategy Team and data providers.
A common source of patient-level data comes from investigator-led observational studies. These studies are instrumental as they typically contain the risk factors and endpoints, measured over timeframes, that are relevant for clinical trials. Such data is further augmented by publicly available statistics from the published literature and insights from experts and key opinion leaders (KOLs) in the relevant therapeutic field. All data sources are synthesised into an integrated database that captures the relevant knowledge and associated uncertainty using a range of data models.
7. What skill level is required to use KerusCloud?
KerusCloud has been designed to be used by statisticians involved in the design of clinical trials to facilitate evidence-based decision-making by all stakeholders in clinical development through study simulation. However, as KerusCloud does not require programming skills it is easy to master with appropriate support and a working knowledge of variable distributions and correlations. This is facilitated by the software’s intuitive point-and-click user-interface which makes it easy to set up a project and navigate through the input and analysis of data.
8. Who is the typical end-user of KerusCloud?
Typically, end-users are statisticians seeking to bring a quantitative approach to early decision-making when clinical research teams are selecting the design and analysis approach to be taken for a study. KerusCloud gives statisticians the means to provide a robust statistical basis for any study design, removing personal bias by ensuring that design and analysis choices are made empirically from the outset. By providing a quantitative framework for early decision-making when many study parameters may be unknown, KerusCloud enables statisticians to demonstrate to the broader clinical teams both numerically and visually which design choices are most likely to deliver meaningful answers to complex clinical questions. This method dramatically improves the probability of success of real-time studies, de-risking study protocols and shortening development timelines.
9. How secure are my data, simulations and results within KerusCloud?
KerusCloud offers best in class security with unparalleled cloud security measures and multi-factor authentication for complete control over access rights. KerusCloud is deployed in a “Virtual Private Cloud” on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which