The pharmaceutical productivity gap - Incremental decline in R&D efficiency despite transient improvements.

Rising research and development costs, currently exceeding $3.5 billion per novel drug, reflect a five-decade decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency. While recent reports suggest a potential turnaround, this review offers a systems-level analysis to explore whether this marks a structural shift or transient reversal.

The influence of the reference level on loudness and preference judgements for spectrally manipulated fan sounds.

Fan sounds are often quantified using A-weighted sound pressure levels, silently acknowledging their limitations to fully capture the perceived unpleasantness. To overcome this limitation, level adjustments are a way to quantify the subjective preference of spectrally different sounds in listening experiments by adjusting the level of a test sound until it is equally preferred to a fixed reference sound. Since equal loudness contours differ, depending on the overall level, level adjustments might vary for different levels of the reference sound.

An Innovative AI-based primer design tool for precise and accurate detection of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern.

As the COVID-19 pandemic winds down, it leaves behind the serious concern that future, even more disruptive pandemics may eventually surface. One of the crucial steps in handling the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was being able to detect the presence of the virus in an accurate and timely manner, to then develop policies counteracting the spread. Nevertheless, as the pandemic evolved, new variants with potentially dangerous mutations appeared.

Booster vaccination with Ad26.COV2.S or an Omicron-adapted vaccine in pre-immune hamsters protects against Omicron BA.2.

Since the original outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, several rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC) have emerged. Here, we show that a single dose of Ad26.COV2.

Multispecies probiotics promote perceived human health and wellbeing: insights into the value of retrospective studies on user experiences.

When taking a broader perspective on the societal impact of probiotics, engagement of end-users is important to discover unmet needs, define relevant health benefits and identify key considerations for successful implementation in daily practice. This study therefore takes a retrospective approach and analyses a database of user experiences to review the effects of four multispecies probiotic formulations. The user experiences were analysed in a dependent sample manner (without control group) and complement previous randomised controlled trials that have been performed with the formulations.