Early-phase clinical trials in the pandemic era: a four-year experience from an academic cancer center.

Early-phase clinical trials are the first step in cancer drug development. However, they are becoming difficult to conduct - increased complexity of treatments, multiple stakeholders, and most importantly, the changes imposed by the COVID19 pandemic. We report our experience during and since the pandemic, focusing on early-phase clinical trials for solid tumors.

Integrating HIV prevention with family planning services for adolescent girls and young women in Uganda: perspectives of adolescent girls and young women, health care providers, and policymakers.

Introduction: Persistently high HIV incidence among women, especially adolescent girls and young women (AGYW), have drawn the attention of national policymakers, donors, and implementers in Sub-Saharan Africa to the integration of HIV and family planning (FP) programs. According to several research studies, FP services could offer a holistic strategy to address the HIV and FP needs of this demographic by including HIV prevention approaches, particularly HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis. Our study set out to explore the obstacles and opportunities that AGYW faced in accessing, using, and continuing HIV prevention and contraceptive services; to develop ideas for novel service models that would allow AGYW to receive integrated, HIV prevention and contraception services; and to evaluate the viability, scalability, and acceptability of these models through dialogues with stakeholders using a human-centered design approach.

External validation of the German Registry for Acute Aortic Dissection Type A score in patients undergoing surgery for acute type A aortic dissection.

Objective: Surgery for acute type A aortic dissection carries a high risk of morbidity and mortality compared with routine cardiac surgical procedures. The German Registry for Acute Aortic Dissection Type A score has been recommended for use as a mortality risk-stratification tool in recent guidelines. We sought to externally validate this score in our local population.

The lack of a biorepository during vaccine trials: A lost opportunity to understand staphylococcal immunity.

Development of a vaccine against Staphylococcus aureus has proven to be difficult, in no small measure due to our lack of understanding of the human immune response to this pathogen. Because the human immune response is distinct from other species often used for pre-clinical animal models, including non-human primates, it will be necessary to perform studies in humans to guide vaccine development. One can view the staphylococcal vaccine clinical trials as an opportunity to study human immune response to S.