ABSTRACT
A wide range of polymer-based drug delivery systems have been reported for the treatment of various diseases. However, the dosing regimen of many drugs, such as stimulator of interferon genes agonists, programmed cell death protein-1 antibodies, and coronavirus disease 2019 vaccines, consists of repeated intratumoral or intramuscular injections. These repeated administrations may lead to poor adherence, thus resulting in compromised therapeutic outcomes and increased financial burden. Here, we devel-oped a multidose drug delivery platform by engineering polylactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) with different molecular weights into self-healing single-cavity microcapsules (SSM). This approach showed a flexible collocation strategy to achieve customized pulsatile drug release and was fully degradable with good safety. Notably, this single-injection delivery system contains only PLGA, holding great promise for clinical translation.(c) 2022 Chinese Society of Particuology and Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
ABSTRACT
Social distancing is widely acknowledged as an effective public health policy combating the novel coronavirus. But extreme forms of social distanc-ing, like isolation and quarantine, have costs, and it is not clear how much social distancing is needed to achieve public health effects. In this article we develop a design-based framework to test the causal null hypothesis and make inference about the dose-response relationship between reduction in social mobility and COVID-19 related public health outcomes. We first dis-cuss how to embed observational data with a time-independent, continuous treatment dose into an approximate randomized experiment and develop a randomization-based procedure that tests if a structured dose-response relationship fits the data. We then generalize the design and testing procedure to a longitudinal setting and apply them to investigate the effect of social distancing during the first phased reopening in the United States on public health outcomes using data compiled from Unacast™, the United States Census Bu-reau, and the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps Program. We rejected a primary analysis null hypothesis that stated the social distancing from April 27, 2020 to June 28, 2020, had no effect on the COVID-19-related death toll from June 29, 2020 to August 2, 2020 (p-value < 0.001), and found that it took more reduction in mobility to prevent exponential growth in case num-bers for nonrural counties compared to rural counties. © Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2023.
ABSTRACT
The pandemic COVID-19 gives rise to a serious threat to people's health, economic development and social stability. This paper employs uncertain regression analysis to model the cumulative number of COVID-19 infection in Brazil. Some fundamental knowledge about the uncertain regression analysis is reviewed firstly. Then parameter estimation, residual analysis, uncertain hypothesis test and the forecast value and confidence interval are studied for confirmed COVID-19 cases in Brazil. As a byproduct, the reason for using uncertain regression analysis instead of probabilistic regression analysis is explained by analyzing the characteristics of the residual plot. All the analysis and prediction are devoted to proposing some theoretical supports for the epidemic prevention and control to some extent. © 2022 World Scientific Publishing Company.
ABSTRACT
A wide range of polymer-based drug delivery systems have been reported for the treatment of various diseases. However, the dosing regimen of many drugs, such as stimulator of interferon genes agonists, programmed cell death protein-1 antibodies, and coronavirus disease 2019 vaccines, consists of repeated intratumoral or intramuscular injections. These repeated administrations may lead to poor adherence, thus resulting in compromised therapeutic outcomes and increased financial burden. Here, we developed a multidose drug delivery platform by engineering polylactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) with different molecular weights into self-healing single-cavity microcapsules (SSM). This approach showed a flexible collocation strategy to achieve customized pulsatile drug release and was fully degradable with good safety. Notably, this single-injection delivery system contains only PLGA, holding great promise for clinical translation. © 2022 Chinese Society of Particuology and Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences