Macromolecular Drug Delivery: Basic Principles and Therapeutic Applications

Macromolecular drugs hold great promise as novel therapeutics of several major disorders, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. However, their use is limited by lack of efficient, safe, and specific delivery strategies. Successful development of such strategies requires interdisciplinary collaborations involving researchers with expertise on e.g., polymer chemistry, cell biology, nano technology, systems biology, advanced imaging methods, and clinical medicine. This poses obvious challenges to the scientific community, but also provides opportunities for the unexpected at the interface between different disciplines. This review summarizes recent studies of macromolecular delivery that should be of interest to researchers involved in macromolecular drug synthesis as well as in vitro and in vivo drug delivery studies.     

Survey of Argentine Health Researchers on the Use of Evidence in Policymaking

Objective

In this study, Argentine health researchers were surveyed regarding their perceptions of facilitators and barriers to evidence-based policymaking in Argentina, as well as their publication activities, and research environment satisfaction.

Methods

A self-administered online survey was sent to health researchers in Argentina. The survey questions were based on a preceding qualitative study of Argentine health researchers, as well as the scientific literature.

Results

Of the 647 researchers that were reached, 226 accessed the survey, for a response rate of 34.9%. Over 80% of researchers surveyed had never been involved in or contributed to decision-making, while over 90% of researchers indicated they would like to be involved in the decision-making process. Decision-maker self-interest was perceived to be the driving factor in the development of health and healthcare policies. Research conducted by a research leader was seen to be the most influential factor in influencing health policy, followed by policy relevance of the research. With respect to their occupational environment, researchers rated highest and most favourably the opportunities available to present, discuss and publish research results and their ability to further their education and training. Argentine researchers surveyed demonstrated a strong interest and willingness to contribute their work and expertise to inform Argentine health policy development.

Conclusion

Despite Argentina’s long scientific tradition, there are relatively few institutionalized linkages between health research results and health policymaking. Based on the results of this study, the disconnect between political decision-making and the health research system, coupled with fewer opportunities for formalized or informal researcher/decision-maker interaction, contribute to the challenges in evidence informing health policymaking in Argentina. Improving personal contact and the building of relationships between researchers and policymakers in Argentina will require taking into account researcher perceptions of policymakers, as highlighted in this study.     

Conducting metagenomic studies in microbiology and clinical research

Owing to the increased cost-effectiveness of high-throughput technologies, the number of studies focusing on the human microbiome and its connections to human health and disease has recently surged. However, best practices in microbiology and clinical research have yet to be clearly established. Here, we present an overview of the challenges and opportunities involved in conducting a metagenomic study, with a particular focus on data processing and analytical methods.

     

Effectiveness of web-based personalised e‑Coaching lifestyle interventions

Introduction

Interventions to reduce the impact of modifiable risk factors, such as hypercholesterolaemia, smoking, and overweight, have the potential to significantly decrease the cardiovascular disease burden. The majority of the global population is unaware of their own risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Parallel to the lack of awareness, a rise in obesity and diabetes is observed. e‑Health tools for lifestyle improvement have shown to be effective in changing unhealthy behaviour. In this study we report on the results of three different trials assessing the effectiveness of MyCLIC, an e‑Coaching lifestyle intervention tool.

Methods

From 2008 to 2016 we conducted three trials: 1) HAPPY NL: a prospective cohort study in the Netherlands, 2) HAPPY AZM: a prospective cohort study with employees of Maastricht UMC+ and 3) HAPPY LONDON: a single-centre, randomised controlled trial with asymptomatic individuals who have a high 10-year CVD risk.

Results

HAPPY NL and HAPPY AZM showed that e‑Coaching reduced cardiovascular risk. Both prospective trials showed a 20–25% relative reduction in 10-year cardiovascular disease risk. A lesser effect was seen in the HAPPY LONDON trial. A low frequency of logins suggests a low degree of content engagement in the e‑Coaching group, which could be age related as the mean age of the participants in the HAPPY LONDON study was high.

Conclusion

e-Coaching using MyCLIC is a low cost and effective method to perform lifestyle interventions and has the potential to reduce the 10-year cardiovascular disease risk.

     

As we come to the end of 2011, several members of the Genome Biology Editorial Board give their views on the state of play in genomics

As we come to the end of 2011, Genome Biology has asked some members of our Editorial Board for their views on the state of play in genomics. What was their favorite paper of 2011? What are the challenges in their particular research area? Who has had the biggest influence on their careers? What advice would they give to young researchers embarking on a career in research?     

A hotspots analysis-relation discovery representation model for revealing diabetes mellitus and obesity

Background

Nowadays, because of the huge economic burden on society causing by obesity and diabetes, they turn into the most serious public health challenges in the world. To reveal the close and complex relationships between diabetes, obesity and other diseases, search the effective treatment for them, a novel model named as representative latent Dirichlet allocation (RLDA) topic model is presented.

Results

RLDA was applied to a corpus of more than 337,000 literatures of diabetes and obesity which were published from 2007 to 2016. To unveil those meaningful relationships between diabetes mellitus, obesity and other diseases, we performed an explicit analysis on the output of our model with a series of visualization tools. Then, with the clinical reports which were not used in the training data to show the credibility of our discoveries, we find that a sufficient number of these records are matched directly. Our results illustrate that in the last 10 years, for obesity accompanying diseases, scientists and researchers mainly focus on 17 of them, such as asthma, gastric disease, heart disease and so on; for the study of diabetes mellitus, it features a more broad scope of 26 diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and so forth; for both of them, there are 15 accompanying diseases, listed as following: adrenal disease, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, depression, heart disease, hepatitis, hypertension, hypothalamic disease, respiratory disease, myocardial infarction, OSAS, liver disease, lung disease, schizophrenia, tuberculosis. In addition, tumor necrosis factor, tumor, adolescent obesity or diabetes, inflammation, hypertension and cell are going be the hot topics related to diabetes mellitus and obesity in the next few years.

Conclusions

With the help of RLDA, the hotspots analysis-relation discovery results on diabetes and obesity were achieved. We extracted the significant relationships between them and other diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and tumor. It is believed that the new proposed representation learning algorithm can help biomedical researchers better focus their attention and optimize their research direction.

     

A collaborative approach to bridging the gap between wildlife managers and researchers

Although most wildlife professionals agree that science should inform wildlife management decisions, disconnect still exists between researchers and managers. If researchers are not striving to incorporate their findings into management decisions, support for research programs by managers can wane. If managers are not using research findings to inform management decisions, those decisions may be less effective or more vulnerable to legal challenges. Both of these situations can have negative consequences for wildlife conservation. We outline a collaborative research-management approach to bridging the gap between wildlife managers and researchers. We describe differences in perspectives, perceptions, and priorities between managers and researchers; outline how and why the divide between researchers and managers has likely occurred and continues to grow; and present specific strategies and recommendations to foster stronger collaborations between managers and researchers. We advocate increased synergy between managers and researchers based on a shared vision of conservation and a collaborative structure that rewards researchers and managers. Most importantly, we suggest that relationships and communication between managers and researchers must be established early in research development and decision-making processes, fostering the trust needed for collaboration. Institutions and agencies can facilitate these relationships by creating opportunities and incentives for integrating collaborative research into management decisions. We suggest this approach will strengthen ties between researchers and managers, increase relevance of research to management decisions, promote effectiveness of management decisions, reduce legal challenges, and ultimately produce positive, tangible, and lasting effects on wildlife conservation. © 2019 The Wildlife Society.     

The 12th International Workshops on Opportunistic Protists (IWOP‐12)

The 12th International Workshops on Opportunistic Protists (IWOP‐12) was held in August 2012 in Tarrytown, New York. The objectives of the IWOP meetings are to: (1) serve as a forum for exchange of new information among active researchers concerning the basic biology, molecular genetics, immunology, biochemistry, pathogenesis, drug development, therapy, and epidemiology of these immunodeficiency‐associated pathogenic eukaryotic microorganisms that are seen in patients with AIDS and (2) foster the entry of new and young investigators into these underserved research areas. The IWOP meeting focuses on opportunistic protists, e.g. the free‐living amoebae, Pneumocystis, Cryptosporidium, Toxoplasma, the Microsporidia, and kinetoplastid flagellates. This conference represents the major conference that brings together research groups working on these opportunistic pathogens. Slow but steady progress is being achieved on understanding the biology of these pathogenic organisms, their involvement in disease causation in both immune‐deficient and immune‐competent hosts, and is providing critical insights into these emerging and reemerging pathogens. This IWOP meeting demonstrated the importance of newly developed genomic level information for many of these pathogens and how analysis of such large data sets is providing key insights into the basic biology of these organisms. A great concern is the loss of scientific expertise and diversity in the research community due to the ongoing decline in research funding. This loss of researchers is due to the small size of many of these research communities and a lack of appreciation by the larger scientific community concerning the state of art and challenges faced by researchers working on these organisms.     

Conducting Studies with Fathers: Challenges and Opportunities

Traditionally, researchers interested in understanding father involvement in the lives of young children have relied on mothers as proxy respondents for fathers, yet recent research has made noteworthy strides in collecting data from fathers themselves yielding an unprecedented wealth of data on fathers' involvement in their children's lives. Despite this progress, there remain many methodological challenges in conducting studies with fathers and their children. Therefore, this article highlights several methodological challenges, including the identification of fathers, recruitment of fathers as participants, and retention of participants in small-scale studies with longitudinal designs, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of several strategies our research team and others have used to collect data from fathers. The paper concludes with a set of suggestions for improving methodological approaches in fatherhood research, as well as remaining challenges in this area of study.     

Scientific research: From freedom to deontology

Abstract

It is traditional to consider that scientific research should be free. During the past, it has been affected by material and intellectual constraints; these constraints have evolved but exist still today.

Because of the unity of the ocean, researchers, and especially oceanographers, claim a scientific immunity for their work. Because of the resources of the oceans, governments explicitly or implicitly consider freedom of scientific research as an application of the doctrine of economic liberalism, with its advantages and its disadvantages.

Be that as it may, scientific research is absolutely necessary. To make compatible the demands of researchers and governments, freedom may become deontology. Researchers receive from authorities the largest rights of circulation applying to individuals, to materials, and to ideas. Researchers have, in counterpart, the duty to protect, to develop and to share the knowledge resulting from their work.     

Cardioprotective role of G-Protein Coupled Estrogen Receptor 1 (GPER1)

Abstract

G-Protein Coupled Estrogen Receptor 1 (GPER1), also known as G-Protein Coupled Receptor 30 (GPR30) and initially considered an orphan receptor, has become one of the most important pharmacological targets in cardiovascular research. Since the gene encoding this putative receptor was cloned nearly 20 years ago, researchers have addressed its role in various aspects of physiology, including cardioprotection. Although extensive research has been carried out to understand the role of GPER1 as a pharmacological target to treat cardiovascular diseases, there are few current reviews addressing the overall cardioprotective benefits of this receptor and the signaling intermediates involved. This review considers the origins of GPER1, its cell biology, its physiological and pharmacological roles as a therapeutic target in cardiovascular disease, and what future research on GPER1 might entail. More specifically, the review focuses on GPER1 regulation of Angiotensin Type I Receptor (AT1R) and the role of estrogen receptors, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) in bringing about the cardioprotective effects of GPER1. Areas where improved knowledge of GPER1 biology is still needed to better understand the receptor’s cardioprotective effects are also discussed.     

The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax

The exclusion of Blacks/African-Americans, Latinx/Hispanics, and Indigenous people from science has resulted in their underrepresentation in the biomedical workforce, especially in academia. Faculty diversity at academic institutions is unacceptably low (<6%) and has remained unchanged in the past 20 years. Despite low representation, faculty of color are disproportionately tasked with service to enhance diversity and inclusion of the academy, often to the detriment of their research and academic success. This essay offers a perspective on the undue burden of service placed on underrepresented faculty to achieve institutional diversity and inclusion. I reflect on the challenges that faculty of color face trying to maintain a competitive research program while serving the needs of the academy, often in a capacity greater than that of their well-represented peers. I also discuss opportunities for faculty of color to leverage related diversity and inclusion work to boost their career progression and academic advancement.

JoAnn Trejo     

Promiscuity of Hosting Nitrogen Fixation in Rice: An Overview from the Legume Perspective

ABSTRACT:?

The subject area of this review provides extraordinary challenges and opportunities. The challenges relate to the fact that the integration of various fields such as microbiology, biochemistry, plant physiology, eukaryotic as well as bacterial genetics, and applied plant sciences are required to assess the disposition of rice, an alien host, for establishing such a unique phenomenon as biological nitrogen fixation. The opportunities signify that, if successful, the breakthrough will have a significant impact on the global economy and will help improve the environment. This review highlights the literature related to the area of legume-rhizobia interactions, particularly those aspects whose understanding is of particular interest in the perspective of rice. This review also discusses the progress achieved so far in this area of rice research and the possibility of built-in nitrogen fixation in rice in the future. However, it is to be borne in mind that such research does not ensure any success at this point. It provides a unique opportunity to broaden our knowledge and understanding about many aspects of plant growth regulation in general.     

Monoterpenes and their derivatives as agents for cardiovascular disease management: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundMonoterpenes are one of the most studied plant's secondary metabolites, they are found abundantly in essential oils of aromatic plants. They also have a great range of pharmacological properties, such as antihypertensive, bradycardic, antiarrhythmic and hypotensive. In the face of the burden caused by cardiovascular disease (CVDs) worldwide, studies using monoterpenes to assess their cardiovascular effects have increased over the years.PurposeThis systematic review aimed to summarize the use of monoterpenes in animal models of any CVDs.MethodsPubMed, SCOPUS, LILACS and Web of Science databases were used to search for articles that used monoterpenes, in any type of administration, to treat or prevent CVDs in animal models. The PRISMA guidelines were followed. Two independent researchers extracted main characteristics of studies, methods and outcomes. Data obtained were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively.ResultsAt the ending of the search process, 33 articles were selected for the systematic review. Of these, 17 articles were included in the meta-analysis. A total of 16 different monoterpenes were found for the treatment of hypertension, myocardial infarction, pulmonary hypertension, cardiac hypertrophy and arrhythmia. The main actions include hypotension, bradycardia, vasodilatation, antiarrhythmic, and antioxidant and antiapoptotic properties. From our data, it can be suggested that monoterpenes may be a significant source for new drug development. However, there is still a need to apply these knowledge into clinical research and a long path to pursue before putting them in the market.ConclusionThe variability of cardiovascular effects demonstrated by the monoterpenes highlighted them as a promising candidates for treatment or prevention of CVDs. Nevertheless, studies that investigate their biological sites of action needs to be further encouraged.     

The 13th International Workshops on Opportunistic Protists (IWOP13)

The 13th International Workshops on Opportunistic Protists (IWOP‐13) was held November 13–15, 2014 in Seville, Spain. The objectives of the IWOP meetings are to: (1) serve as a forum for exchange of new information among active researchers concerning the basic biology, molecular genetics, immunology, biochemistry, pathogenesis, drug development, therapy, and epidemiology of these immunodeficiency‐associated pathogenic eukaryotic microorganisms that are seen in patients with AIDS and; (2) to foster the entry of new and young investigators into these underserved research areas. The IWOP meeting focuses on opportunistic protists; e.g. the free‐living amoebae, Pneumocystis, Cryptosporidium, Toxoplasma, the Microsporidia, and kinetoplastid flagellates. This conference represents the major conference which brings together research groups working on these opportunistic pathogens. Progress has been achieved on understanding the biology of these pathogenic organisms, their involvement in disease causation in both immune deficient and immune competent hosts and is providing important insights into these emerging and reemerging pathogens. A continuing concern of the participants is the ongoing loss of scientific expertise and diversity in this research community. This decline is due to the small size of these research communities and an ongoing lack of understanding by the broader scientific community of the challenges and limitations faced by researchers working on these organisms, which makes these research communities very sensitive to declines in research funding.     

Opportunities and challenges with transitioning to non-lethal sampling of wild fish for microbiome research

The microbial communities of fish are considered an integral part of maintaining the overall health and fitness of their host. Research has shown that resident microbes reside on various mucosal surfaces, such as the gills, skin, and gastrointestinal tract, and play a key role in various host functions, including digestion, immunity, and disease resistance. A second, more transient group of microbes reside in the digesta, or feces, and are primarily influenced by environmental factors such as the host diet. The vast majority of fish microbiome research currently uses lethal sampling to analyse any one of these mucosal and/or digesta microbial communities. The present paper discusses the various opportunities that non-lethal microbiome sampling offers, as well as some inherent challenges, with the ultimate goal of creating a sound argument for future researchers to transition to non-lethal sampling of wild fish in microbiome research. Doing so will reduce animal welfare and population impacts on fish while creating novel opportunities to link host microbial communities to an individual's behavior and survival across space and time (e.g., life-stages, seasons). Current lethal sampling efforts constrain our ability to understand the mechanistic ecological consequences of variation in microbiome communities in the wild. Transitioning to non-lethal sampling will open new frontiers in ecological and microbial research.     

Ethical principles for promoting health research data sharing with sub‐Saharan Africa

A powerful feature of global health research is data‐sharing with regions which bear the heaviest burden of disease. It offers novel opportunities for aggregating data to address critical global health challenges in ways higher than relying on individual studies. Yet there exist important stratifiers of the capacity to share data, particularly across the Global North‐South divide. Systemic challenges that characterize sub‐Saharan Africa and disadvantage the region's scientific productivity threaten the burgeoning data‐sharing culture too. Like all endeavors requiring equal commitments under unequal circumstances, a strong ethical impetus is needed to help reduce inequities and imbalances to encourage adherence. This article discusses mandatory data‐sharing in relation to peculiar challenges faced by sub‐Saharan African scientists to suggest ethical principles for rethinking and reframing solutions. We propose six principles which mirror guidelines from the Institute of Medicine and encapsulate principles from the Emanuel Framework, Nairobi Data Sharing Principles, and the COHRED guidelines.     

Metaproteomic data analysis at a glance: advances in computational microbial community proteomics

Introduction: Within the last decade, the study of microbial communities has gained increasing research interest also driven by the recognition of the important role of these consortia in human health and disease. Metaproteomics, the analysis of the entire set of proteins from all microorganisms present in one ecosystem, has become a prominent technique for studying the relation between taxonomic diversity and functional profile of microbial communities.

Areas covered: The aim of this review is to address opportunities and challenges of metaproteomics from a computational perspective. Appealing to an audience of microbial ecologists and proteomic researchers alike, we provide an overview on state-of-the-art software and databases by which metaproteome data can be readily analyzed.

Expert commentary: While tailored protein databases, combined search algorithms and iterative workflows are means to improve the identification yield, software tools for taxonomic and functional analysis are challenged by the vast amount of unannotated sequences in metaproteomics.