"Suction Tube Uterine Tamponade" for treatment of refractory postpartum hemorrhage: Internal feasibility and acceptability pilot of a randomized clinical trial.

Objective: To assess feasibility and acceptability of a novel, low-cost "Suction Tube Uterine Tamponade" (STUT) treatment for refractory postpartum hemorrhage (PPH).

Methods: We allocated patients with refractory PPH by randomly ordered envelopes to STUT or routine uterine balloon tamponade (UBT, Ellavi free-flow system) in 10 hospitals in South Africa. In the STUT group, a 24FG Levin stomach tube was inserted into the uterine cavity and vacuum created with a vacuum pump or manual vacuum aspiration syringe.

A biochemically-realisable relational model of the self-manufacturing cell.

As shown by Hofmeyr, the processes in the living cell can be divided into three classes of efficient causes that produce each other, so making the cell closed to efficient causation, the hallmark of an organism. They are the enzyme catalysts of covalent metabolic chemistry, the intracellular milieu that drives the supramolecular processes of chaperone-assisted folding and self-assembly of polypeptides and nucleic acids into functional catalysts and transporters, and the membrane transporters that maintain the intracellular milieu, in particular its electrolyte composition. Each class of efficient cause can be modelled as a relational diagram in the form of a mapping in graph-theoretic form, and a minimal model of a self-manufacturing system that is closed to efficient causation can be constructed from these three mappings using the formalism of relational biology.

Kinetic modelling of compartmentalised reaction networks.

This paper presents a comprehensive treatment of kinetic modelling of compartmentalised reaction networks in the context of systems biology. There is still a lot of confusion about how to go about constructing compartment models, and many published models are flawed with respect to how they handle compartmentation. The modelling framework described here answers two key questions: Which rate laws should be used to describe the rates of reactions in compartmentalised systems? How should these rate laws be incorporated in the ordinary differential equations (ODEs) that describe the dynamics of the compartmentalised system? The framework rests on the fundamental definition of reaction rate as the number of reaction events per time, which is related to the time derivative of mole amount of reactant or product, an extensive property that is directly proportional to the size of the compartment in which the reaction events occur.