An evaluation method for medical intervention effect of urban anthrax aerosol terrorist attacks / 第二军医大学学报

Objective To establish a quantitative evaluation method for medical treatment effect of anthrax aerosol terrorist attacks. Methods We established an evaluation framework for the medical treatment effect of anthrax events through constructing the decision tree model of medical intervention after anthrax exposure, the allocation model of key resources consumption and the model of population state transition under different intervention measures. Then, under the scenario of the anthrax terrorist attacks in the big cities of China, we analyzed and evaluated the effects of 52 intervention strategies on the number of cases, peak value, and deaths based on the discrete event simulation method. Results The intervention effect was sensitive to time delay in intervention and resource reserve. When time delay in intervention was 1 h after the attack, the resource stock increase from 25% to 100% could reduce the deaths by 59.91%; while only about 7.33% of the deaths were reduced when the intervention was performed at 145 h after the attack. The intervention strategy had little effect on the peak time of the morbidity, with the maximum value being 10.52 d and the minimum value being 9.67 d; but it had a greater impact on the peak number of patients, with the maximum value being 255 072 patients and the minimum value being 103 943 patients. Conclusion A quantitative evaluation method for medical treatment effect of anthrax aerosol terrorist attacks is established in this study, and it may be conducive to medical rescue capacity building and emergency strategy-making.

Design of recombinase and terminator-based genetic switches for cell state control / 生物工程学报

Various genetic switches have been developed to let engineered cells perform designed functions. However, a sustained input is often needed to maintain the on/off state, which is energy-consuming and sensitive to perturbation. Therefore, we developed a set of transcriptional switches for cell states control that were constructed by the inversion effect of site-specific recombinases on terminators. Such a switch could respond to a pulse signal and maintain the new state by itself until the next input. With a bottom-up design principle, we first characterized the terminators and recombinases. Then the mutual interference was studied to select compatible pairs, which were used to achieve one-time and two-time state transitions. Finally, we constructed a biological seven-segment display as a demonstration to prove such switch's immense potential for application.