Advantages and limitations of online communities of patients for research on health products.

The way patients and their caregivers share information on various online platforms about health topics and their own experiential knowledge presents new potential environments for research, particularly as concerns health products. The information provided individually and voluntarily by patients who are members of these online communities is a new resource for identifying and understanding precisely how health products are used, assessing their effectiveness, quantifying potential adverse effects in real-life situations, detecting subtle signs that are significant for experts in pharmacovigilance and addiction studies, and developing new assessment tools to help form new working hypotheses. How patients freely express their experiences and feelings and the reality of what they share also opens the way for societal research into health products, a field that is still under-explored.

What strategy should France implement for H2020?

The initiation of Horizon 2020--the European Union's 8th Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, allotted a budget of 79 billion euros--provides an opportunity to review France's participation in previous Framework Programmes. Indeed, French participation does not match either its scientific importance or its financial investment. While France contributed 16.

Non-interventional research and usual care: definition, regulatory aspects, difficulties and recommendations.

Non-interventional research is an essential approach to gathering data in different situations and it often complements other research methodologies, such as biomedical research and research aimed at evaluating usual care. Yet the legislative framework for this type of research is nonexistent, and this void poses a number of problems for non-interventional researchers, including an absence of any guarantee of quality and therefore of reliability, a limited recognition of the research beyond our borders, cumbersome administrative procedures, and a lack of visibility. In light of the growing demand for data, particularly in post marketing authorisation for drugs, which largely relies on non-interventional methods, the Round Table participants have issued a set of proposals for a future legislative framework for this type of research.

[The place of a new drug in the therapeutic strategy].

A therapeutic strategy is a hierarchical set of appropriate measures to provide an answer to a pathological state. A drug is a part of this set (together with the diagnosis, the environment and the other medicinal interventions or not). A new drug's place in a therapeutic strategy can be evaluated according to one or several referential(s) when it (or they) exist, referentials which express the state of knowledge before launch of the new drug.

In vitro and in vivo ciprofloxacin pharmacokinetics in human neutrophils.

Early in vitro investigations have shown that ciprofloxacin is concentrated within human neutrophils (polymorphonuclear leukocytes [PMNs]) at between 3 and 11 times the extracellular concentration. The elution of ciprofloxacin from cells is relatively rapid when the extracellular concentration is reduced. In order to estimate the in vivo intracellular penetration of ciprofloxacin and to determine its intracellular pharmacokinetics, PMNs were recovered from blood samples drawn from healthy volunteers at different times during a 24-h period after they were given a 750-mg oral dose.

Faecal excretion of ciprofloxacin after a single oral dose and its effect on faecal bacteria in healthy volunteers.

High concentrations of ciprofloxacin have been shown to persist in the faeces of volunteers for several days after a week of oral treatment with this drug, which was also found to have a prolonged effect on aerobic Gram-negative intestinal bacteria. To determine whether a shorter course of ciprofloxacin would have the same prolonged effect, we treated ten healthy adult volunteers with a single oral dose of 750 mg ciprofloxacin and found that this was not followed by any significant changes in the counts of anaerobes or streptococci, but that there was a mean decrease of 2.5 log10 cfu/ml in the counts of faecal Enterobacteriaceae, which lasted for a full week.