Promising Practices in Capacity Development for Health Supply Chains in Resource-Constrained Countries.

Performance gaps in health supply chains in low- and middle-income countries contribute significantly to inefficiencies and underperformance of their health systems. Some significant factors hindering the performance of supply chains in low and middle-income countries include low human resource capacity and capability, weak structures for monitoring supply chain performance, weak in-service and pre-service training programs, chronic underfunding, lack of transparency and an overdependence on obsolete methods, like manual data gathering, record-keeping, and analyses. Although proven health supply chain strengthening techniques exist, the level of adoption of these practices has varied across countries, resulting in multiple capacity gaps and underperforming supply chains.

Characterisation of protective vaccine antigens from the thiol-containing components of excretory/secretory material of Ostertagia ostertagi.

Previous vaccination trials have demonstrated that thiol proteins affinity purified from Ostertagia ostertagi excretory-secretory products (O. ostertagi ES-thiol) are protective against homologous challenge. Here we have shown that protection induced by this vaccine was consistent across four independent vaccine-challenge experiments.

Use of volumetric absorptive microsampling and parallel reaction monitoring mass spectrometry for tacrolimus blood trough measurements at home in pediatric heart transplant patients.

Background: Measurement of trough levels for calcineurin inhibitors by venipuncture sampling is a mainstay of patient management in solid organ transplant recipients but challenging in pediatric patients. Volumetric Absorptive Microsampling (VAMS) is a patient-friendly, minimally invasive sampling technique to accurately collect blood. An assay for measurement of tacrolimus in blood using VAMS, coupled with parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) mass spectrometry, was validated in pediatric heart transplant patients.

Spinal motoneurons respond aberrantly to serotonin in a rabbit model of cerebral palsy.

Cerebral palsy (CP) is caused by a variety of factors that damage the developing central nervous system. Impaired motor control, including muscle stiffness and spasticity, is the hallmark of spastic CP. Rabbits that experience hypoxic-ischaemic (HI) injury in utero (at 70%-83% gestation) are born with muscle stiffness, hyperreflexia and, as recently discovered, increased 5-HT in the spinal cord.