Haemoglobin level increase as an efficacy biomarker during axitinib treatment for metastatic renal cell carcinoma: a retrospective study.

Background: Axitinib is used after failure of first line treatment for metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC). A known side effect is the increase of haemoglobin level (HbL) during treatment with a suspected correlation with better outcome. Our objective was to examine whether HbL increase during the first three months of axitinib treatment is associated with better prognosis.

Does substitution of brand name medications by generics differ between pharmacotherapeutic classes? A population-based cohort study in France.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to measure the rate of substitution failure to generic antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) compared to two other pharmacotherapeutic classes (neuroleptics, beta-blockers).

Methods: We conducted a cohort study involving beneficiaries of the French health insurance system from January 2009 to November 2012. Substitution failure to generic drugs was estimated by the rate of switchback (i.

Cost analysis of large-scale implementation of the 'Helping Babies Breathe' newborn resuscitation-training program in Tanzania.

Background: Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) has become the gold standard globally for training birth-attendants in neonatal resuscitation in low-resource settings in efforts to reduce early newborn asphyxia and mortality. The purpose of this study was to do a first-ever activity-based cost-analysis of at-scale HBB program implementation and initial follow-up in a large region of Tanzania and evaluate costs of national scale-up as one component of a multi-method external evaluation of the implementation of HBB at scale in Tanzania.

Methods: We used activity-based costing to examine budget expense data during the two-month implementation and follow-up of HBB in one of the target regions.

Isolation and characterization of environmental bacteria capable of extracellular biosorption of mercury.

Accumulation of toxic metals in the environment represents a public health and wildlife concern. Bacteria resistant to toxic metals constitute an attractive biomass for the development of systems to decontaminate soils, sediments, or waters. In particular, biosorption of metals within the bacterial cell wall or secreted extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) is an emerging process for the bioremediation of contaminated water.

Synergy, structure and conformational flexibility of hybrid cellulosomes displaying various inter-cohesins linkers.

Cellulosomes are large extracellular multi-enzyme complexes that exhibit elevated activity on plant cell-wall polysaccharides. In the present study, the relationships between the conformational flexibility and efficacy of cellulosomes, and the inter-modules linkers of their scaffold protein were investigated. For this purpose, the length of the intrinsically disordered Ser/Thr-rich 50-residue linker connecting a Clostridium thermocellum and a Clostridium cellulolyticum cohesin in a hybrid scaffoldin (Scaf4) was changed by sequences ranging from 4 to 128 residues.