Volume 26 Issue 3, March 2020

The FDA launches the RCT DUPLICATE project to develop guidelines on using medical-claims data to expand drug labels.

Tolullah ‘Tolu’ Oni is an urban epidemiologist at the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge and a Next Einstein Forum Fellow and World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

A compounding factor of the outbreak is the potential for the general public to misunderstand the facts and design conspiracy theories.

Private industry is increasingly soliciting hospitals to sell or share health data and biospecimens, but current laws offer more disclosure and consent protections for research participants than for patients receiving clinical care. Hospitals can offer more protections than required by law, however, and should move toward greater transparency with their patients about the research use of clinical health data and biospecimens to respect patients and avoid distrust.

An Ebola virus outbreak taking place in the complex political and social context of The Democratic Republic of the Congo has forced the research community to reflect on their approach to community engagement. Katharine Wright and Michael Parker, on behalf of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Group on research in global health emergencies, say that those affected need to influence research choices from the very beginning and that the value of their knowledge must be recognized.

The strengthening of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has been a turning point in outbreak responses in the area. This represents very welcome progress and development for global health security and diplomacy.

A study in Peru of community-wide implementation of the use of salt substitution strengthens the evidence for its use as a public-health strategy to reduce blood pressure and, thus, chronic disease risk.

Measurement of phosphorylated tau protein in blood plasma allows Alzheimer’s disease to be distinguished from other neurological diseases and may assist in disease detection during the prodromal stage.

Wireless monitoring of vital signs in the neonatal intensive care unit enables the detection of vital signs, body movement, and vocalization.

In late December 2019, a cluster of patients with ‘atypical pneumonia’ of unknown etiology was reported in Wuhan, China. A novel human coronavirus, now provisionally called ‘SARS-CoV-2’, was identified as the cause of this disease, now named ‘COVID-19’.

The authors argue for a consistent weight-management approach, alongside an assessment of the risk for developing cardiometabolic diseases as a prevention strategy.

A new human challenge model of schistosomiasis, which affects more than 290 million people globally, will aid development of novel therapies and vaccines for this neglected tropical disease.

Single-cell transcriptomic analysis identifies a distinct gene signature associated with peripheral monocyte populations that distinguishes people with sepsis from those with sterile inflammation and uninfected controls.

Star-shaped, approximately 1-mm-wide ceramic particles, termed STAR particles, create micropores in the skin and, when added to topical formulations, enhance drug and vaccine delivery through the skin in mice.

The relative concentrations of four metabolites in maternal blood at 36 weeks of gestation predict fetal growth restriction in infants subsequently born at term, enabling enhanced fetal monitoring in pregnancies at risk.

Early results from a first-in-human retinal gene therapy trial for X-linked retinitis pigmentosa indicate that, at an intermediate dose, AAV8-RPGR is safe and in a subset of patients can lead to gains in visual function.

The development of an algorithm that can imperceptibly manipulate electrocardiographic data to fool a deep learning model for diagnosing cardiac arrhythmia highlights the potential vulnerability of artificial intelligence-enabled diagnosis to adversarial attacks.

A machine-learning algorithm based on an array of demographic, physiological and clinical information is able to predict, hours in advance, circulatory failure of patients in the intensive-care unit.

A step-wedged cluster randomized trial, carried out in six villages in Tumbes, Peru, with 2,376 participants, demonstrates population-wide reductions in blood pressure, which appear to be higher in individuals with hypertension, as well as reductions in risk of hypertension by around 50% for those without hypertension at baseline, after community-wide replacement of regular salt with a potassium-enriched alternative.

Plasma P-tau18 level increased with progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and differentiated AD dementia from other neurodegenerative diseases, supporting its further development as a blood-based biomarker for AD.

Plasma pTau181 concentrations are elevated specifically in patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease compared to those diagnosed with frontotemporal lobar degeneration or elderly controls, supporting its further development as a blood-based biomarker for AD.

Site-specific hyperphosphorylations of tau in the cerebrospinal fluid change with disease course, and correlate with pathology and cognitive decline in dominantly inherited Alzheimer’s disease.

A scalable mass cytometry-based method for morphometrically classifying hematopoietic cells demonstrates diagnostic utility when applied to clinical samples.

Soft electronic patches worn on the skin of infants or children in intensive-care units have a wide range of capabilities in aiding critical care, including monitoring of hemodynamic parameters, cardiac activity, movement and crying.

Alum coupled to protein immunogens via site-specific phosphoserine-containing linkers enhances long-lived B cell responses and can selectively direct antibodies toward protective neutralizing epitopes.