Estimating the Treatment and Prophylactic Economic Value of New Antimicrobials in Managing Antibiotic Resistance and Serious Infections for Common Pathogens in the USA: A Population Modelling Study.

Background: Antimicrobial resistance is a growing public health concern. There is a global need to estimate the population-level value of developing new antimicrobials and to ensure the effective use of existing antimicrobials as strategies to counteract antimicrobial resistance. To this aim, population-level value criteria need to be considered alongside conventional value measures.

Capturing Value Attributes in the Economic Evaluation of Ceftazidime with Avibactam for Treating Severe Aerobic Gram-Negative Bacterial Infections in the United Kingdom.

Introduction: Antimicrobial resistance remains a serious and growing threat to public health, both globally and in the UK, leading to diminishing effectiveness of antimicrobials. Despite a clear need for new antimicrobials, the clinical pipeline is insufficient, driven by high research and development costs and limited expected returns on investment. To counteract this, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and National Health Service (NHS) England have launched a reimbursement mechanism, de-linked from volume of sales, that aims to reduce economic risk by recognising the broader population-level value of antimicrobials.

Using Behavior Change Theory to Identify Drivers and Barriers for Antifungal Treatment Decisions: A Case Study in a Large Teaching Hospital in the East of England, UK.

Introduction: Antifungal stewardship (AFS) programs are recognized to contribute to optimizing antifungal prescribing for treatment and prophylaxis. However, only a small number of such programs are implemented. Consequently, evidence on behavioral drivers and barriers of such programs and learnings from existing successful AFS programs is limited.

Tryptophan Production Maximization in a Fed-Batch Bioreactor with Modified Cells, by Optimizing Its Operating Policy Based on an Extended Structured Cell Kinetic Model.

Hybrid kinetic models, linking structured cell metabolic processes to the dynamics of macroscopic variables of the bioreactor, are more and more used in engineering evaluations to derive more precise predictions of the process dynamics under variable operating conditions. Depending on the cell model complexity, such a math tool can be used to evaluate the metabolic fluxes in relation to the bioreactor operating conditions, thus suggesting ways to genetically modify the microorganism for certain purposes. Even if development of such an extended dynamic model requires more experimental and computational efforts, its use is advantageous.

Model-Based Optimization of a Fed-Batch Bioreactor for mAb Production Using a Hybridoma Cell Culture.

Production of monoclonal antibodies () is a well-known method used to synthesize a large number of identical antibodies, which are molecules of huge importance in medicine. Due to such reasons, intense efforts have been invested to maximize the production in bioreactors with hybridoma cell cultures. However, the optimal control of such sensitive bioreactors is an engineering problem difficult to solve due to the large number of state-variables with highly nonlinear dynamics, which often translates into a non-convex optimization problem that involves a significant number of decision (control) variables.

Determination of Some Conditions Leading to Glycolytic Oscillations and Their Interference With Some Other Processes in Cells.

Autonomous oscillations of species levels in the glycolysis express the self-control of this essential cellular pathway belonging to the central carbon metabolism (CCM), and this phenomenon takes place in a large number of bacteria. Oscillations of glycolytic intermediates in living cells occur according to the environmental conditions and to the cell characteristics, especially the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) recovery system. Determining the conditions that lead to the occurrence and maintenance of the glycolytic oscillations can present immediate practical applications.

A systematic literature review and network meta-analysis of effectiveness and safety outcomes in advanced melanoma.

Background: Although a myriad of novel treatments entered the treatment paradigm for advanced melanoma, there is lack of head-to-head evidence. We conducted a network meta-analysis (NMA) to estimate each treatment's relative effectiveness and safety.

Methods: A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted in Embase, MEDLINE and Cochrane to identify all phase III randomised controlled trials (RCTs) with a time frame from January 1, 2010 to March 11, 2019.

Estimating Informal Caregiving Time from Patient EQ-5D Data: The Informal CARE Effect (iCARE) Tool.

Background: Families and friends provide a considerable proportion of care for patients and elderly people. Caregiving can have substantial effects on caregivers' lives, health, and well-being. However, because clinical trials rarely assess these effects, no information on caregiver burden is available when evaluating the cost effectiveness of treatments.

Health inequalities in the Netherlands: trends in quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) by educational level.

Background: Quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) has been proposed as a summary measure of population health because it encompasses multiple health domains as well as length of life. However, trends in QALE by education or other socio-economic measure have not yet been reported. This study investigates changes in QALE stratified by educational level for the Dutch population in the period 2001-2011.

Trends in Dutch hospital spending by age and disease 1994-2010.

Understanding the age pattern of medical spending and changes therein - the purpose of this paper - is essential in an ageing society. We started by combining several data sources to create a comprehensive time-based data series of hospital spending by age group, gender and disease category for The Netherlands in the period 1994-2010. Subsequently, this time series enabled us to disentangle changes in the age pattern of hospital spending to various disease categories.

Quality of life and time to death: have the health gains of preventive interventions been underestimated?

This article explores the implications of the relation between quality of life (QoL) and time to death (TTD) for economic evaluations of preventive interventions. By using health survey data on QoL for the general Dutch population linked to the mortality registry, we quantify the magnitude of this relationship. For addressing specific features of the nonstandard QoL distribution such as boundness, skewness, and heteroscedasticity, we modeled QoL using a generalized additive model for location, scale, and shape (GAMLSS) with a β inflated outcome distribution.

Did the health of the Dutch population improve between 2001 and 2008? Investigating age- and gender-specific trends in quality of life.

Although many countries' populations have experienced increasing life expectancy in recent decades, quality of life (QoL) trends in the general population have yet to be investigated. This paper investigates whether QoL changed for the general Dutch population over the period 2001-2008. A beta regression model was employed to address specific features of the QoL distribution (i.

Evaluation of multivalent dendrimers based on melamine: kinetics of thiol-disulfide exchange depends on the structure of the dendrimer.

The rate of thiol-disulfide exchange of dansyl groups mediated by dithiothreitol depends on the structure of the dendrimer. In general, the rate of exchange decreases as the size of the dendrimer increases. Dendrimers with disulfides attached near the core undergo exchange more slowly than dendrimers with disulfides near the periphery.