Financial impact and healthcare expenditures among surgical patients in Burundi.

Background: The largest proportion of people at risk of catastrophic expenditures for surgical care live in low- and middle-income countries. This study aims to evaluate the financial impact among surgical patients at Kibuye Hope Hospital (KHH) in Burundi.

Methods: Data were collected from patients undergoing a surgical procedure at KHH from January to October 2019.

"It's his cheerfulness that gives me hope": A qualitative analysis of access to pediatric cancer care in Northern Tanzania.

Pediatric cancer is a significant and growing burden in low- and middle-income countries. The objective of this project was to describe the factors influencing access to pediatric cancer care in Northern Tanzania using the Three Delays Model. This was a cross-sectional qualitative study conducted between June and August 2023 at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC).

Expression-based selection identifies a microglia-tropic AAV capsid for direct and CSF routes of administration in mice.

Microglia are critical innate immune cells of the brain. targeting of microglia using gene-delivery systems is crucial for studying brain physiology and developing gene therapies for neurodegenerative diseases and other brain disorders such as NeuroAIDS. Historically, microglia have been extremely resistant to transduction by viral vectors, including adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors.

Metabolic engineering improves transduction efficiency and downstream vector isolation by altering the lipid composition of extracellular vesicle-enclosed AAV.

Adeno-associated viruses (AAV) are promising vectors for gene therapy due to their efficacy in vivo. However, there is room for improvement to address key limitations such as the pre-existing immunity to AAV in patients, high-dose toxicity, and relatively low efficiency for some cell types. This study introduces a metabolic engineering approach, using knockout of the enzyme phosphatidylserine synthase 1 (PTDSS1) to increase the abundance of extracellular vesicle-enclosed AAV (EV-AAV) relative to free AAV in the supernatant of producer cells, simplifying downstream purification processes.