The COVID-19 Resource Centre: an invaluable tool for primary care.

Background: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ontario-based Centre for Effective Practice (CEP) established the COVID-19 Resource Centre (CRC) in March 2020. This platform rapidly became a critical source of clinical and practice guidance for primary care providers, highlighting the importance of effective information synthesis during public health emergencies.

Description: The article discusses the development of the CRC, emphasizing the application of librarianship principles in navigating the challenges posed by the pandemic's information overload and the scarcity of evidence.

Surfacing the causal assumptions and active ingredients of healthcare quality improvement interventions: An application to primary care opioid prescribing.

Background: Efforts to maximize the impact of healthcare improvement interventions are hampered when intervention components are not well defined or described, precluding the ability to understand how and why interventions are expected to work.

Method: We partnered with two organizations delivering province-wide quality improvement interventions to establish how they envisaged their interventions lead to change (their underlying causal assumptions) and to identify active ingredients (behavior change techniques [BCTs]). The interventions assessed were an audit and feedback report and an academic detailing program.

Production, isolation, and shipment of clinically relevant quantities of astatine-211: A simple and efficient approach to increasing supply.

Unlabelled: The alpha emitter astatine-211 (At) is a promising candidate for cancer treatment based on Targeted Alpha (α) Therapy (TAT). A small number of facilities, distributed across the United States, are capable of accelerating α-particle beams to produce At. However, challenges remain regarding strategic methods for shipping At in a form adaptable to advanced radiochemistry reactions and other uses of the radioisotope.

Systematic Interrogation of Tumor Cell Resistance to Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell Therapy in Pancreatic Cancer.

Unlabelled: Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy can lead to dramatic clinical responses in B-cell malignancies. However, early clinical trials with CAR T-cell therapy in non-B-cell malignancies have been disappointing to date, suggesting that tumor-intrinsic features contribute to resistance. To investigate tumor-intrinsic modes of resistance, we performed genome scale CRISPR-Cas9 screens in mesothelin (MSLN)-expressing pancreatic cancer cells.