BIDEN SEEKS ADDED FUNDING FOR RESEARCH, DISEASE TRACKING

To better prepare for the next pandemic, the White House seeks a significant increase in discretionary funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), proposing a $1.6 billion increase to an $8.7 billion budget able to modernize data collection and boost support for local health departments. ARPA-H initially would focus on cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease and is modeled after the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with project funding decisions made by program managers, as opposed to the peer-review process of NIH research institutes. In addition to funding genomic sequencing capacity on the state and federal level, the new program would build a National Bioinformatics Infrastructure throughout the public health system.

Development of a clinical and translational research curriculum for undergraduate students.

Introduction: Research participation during undergraduate years has a powerful influence on career selection and attitudes toward scientific research. Most undergraduate research programs in academic health centers are oriented toward basic research or address a particular disease focus or research discipline. Undergraduate research programs that expose students to clinical and translational research may alter student perceptions about research and influence career selection. Methods: We developed an undergraduate summer research curriculum, anchored upon a clinical and translational research study developed to address a common unmet needs in neonatal nurseries (e.g., assessment of neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome). Program topics reflected the cross-disciplinary expertise that contributed to the development of this "bedside to bench" study, including opioid addiction, vulnerable populations, research ethics, statistics, data collection and management, assay development, analytical laboratory analysis, and pharmacokinetics. The curriculum was delivered through three offerings over 12 months, using Zoom video-conferencing due to restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: Nine students participated in the program. Two-thirds reported the course enhanced their understanding of clinical and translational research. Over three-quarters reported the curriculum topics were very good or excellent. In open-ended questions, students reported that the cross-disciplinary nature of the curriculum was the strongest aspect of the program. Conclusion: The curriculum could be readily adapted by other Clinical and Translational Science Award programs seeking to provide clinical and translational research-oriented programs to undergraduate students. Application of cross-disciplinary research approaches to a specific clinical and translational research question provides students with relevant examples of translational research and translational science.

Reductionist methodology and the ambiguity of the categories of race and ethnicity in biomedical research: an exploratory study of recent evidence.

In this article, we analyse how researchers use the categories of race and ethnicity with reference to genetics and genomics. We show that there is still considerable conceptual "messiness" (despite the wide-ranging and popular debate on the subject) when it comes to the use of ethnoracial categories in genetics and genomics that among other things makes it difficult to properly compare and interpret research using ethnoracial categories, as well as draw conclusions from them. Finally, we briefly reconstruct some of the biases of reductionism to which geneticists (as well as other researchers referring to genetic methods and explanations) are particularly exposed to, and we analyse the problem in the context of the biologization of ethnoracial categories. Our work constitutes a novel, in-depth contribution to the debate about reporting race and ethnicity in biomedical and health research. First, we reconstruct the theoretical background assumptions about racial ontology which researchers implicitly presume in their studies with the aid of a sample of recent papers published in medical journals about COVID-19. Secondly, we use the typology of the biases of reductionism to the problem of biologization of ethnoracial categories with reference to genetics and genomics.

COVID-19 clinical medical relationship extraction based on MPNet

With the rapid development of biomedical research and information technology, the number of clinical medical literature has increased exponentially. At present, COVID-19 clinical text research has some problems, such as lack of corpus and poor annotation quality. In clinical medical literature, there are many medical related semantic relationships between entities. After the task of entity recognition, how to further extract the relationships between entities efficiently and accurately becomes very critical. In this study, a COVID-19 clinical trial data relationship extraction model based on deep learning method is proposed. The model adopts MPNet model, bidirectional-GRU (BiGRU) network, MAtt mechanism and Conditional Random Field inference layer integration architecture and improves the problem that static word vector cannot represent ambiguity through pre-trained language model. BiGRU network is used to replace the current Bi directional long short term memory structure and simplify the network structure of Long Short Term Memory to improve the training efficiency of the model. Through comparative experiments, the proposed method performs well in the COVID-19 clinical text entity relation extraction task. © 2023 The Authors. IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Applications published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Data analysis guidelines for single-cell RNA-seq in biomedical studies and clinical applications.

The application of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) in biomedical research has advanced our understanding of the pathogenesis of disease and provided valuable insights into new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. With the expansion of capacity for high-throughput scRNA-seq, including clinical samples, the analysis of these huge volumes of data has become a daunting prospect for researchers entering this field. Here, we review the workflow for typical scRNA-seq data analysis, covering raw data processing and quality control, basic data analysis applicable for almost all scRNA-seq data sets, and advanced data analysis that should be tailored to specific scientific questions. While summarizing the current methods for each analysis step, we also provide an online repository of software and wrapped-up scripts to support the implementation. Recommendations and caveats are pointed out for some specific analysis tasks and approaches. We hope this resource will be helpful to researchers engaging with scRNA-seq, in particular for emerging clinical applications.

India's Opportunities and Challenges in Establishing a Twin Registry: An Unexplored Human Resource for the World's Second-Most Populous Nation.

Nature and nurture have always been a prerogative of evolutionary biologists. The environment's role in shaping an organism's phenotype has always intrigued us. Since the inception of humankind, twinning has existed with an unsettled parley on the contribution of nature (i.e. genetics) versus nurture (i.e. environment), which can influence the phenotypes. The study of twins measures the genetic contribution and that of the environmental influence for a particular trait, acting as a catalyst, fine-tuning the phenotypic trajectories. This is further evident because a number of human diseases show a spectrum of clinical manifestations with the same underlying molecular aberration. As of now, there is no definite way to conclude just from the genomic data the severity of a disease or even to predict who will get affected. This greatly justifies initiating a twin registry for a country as diverse and populated as India. There is an unmet need to set up a nationwide database to carefully curate the information on twins, serving as a valuable biorepository to study their overall susceptibility to disease. Establishing a twin registry is of paramount importance to harness the wealth of human information related to the biomedical, anthropological, cultural, social and economic significance.

10th EPA Summer School on Research 2021: sharing experience of the first online edition

The European Psychiatric Association (EPA) Summer School is an intensive program which has been organised for 10 years now by the EPA Committee on Education and allows selected psychiatric trainees and early career psychiatrists (ECPs) from all over Europe to meet, network, and learn together. After the 2020 edition being cancelled due to COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 edition was held online and continued the EPA educational mission in an innovative and up-to-date approach. Twenty one participants from 16 different countries were selected to attend by the EPA Committee on Education. During the two full days of training, participants were engaged in fundamental educational activities by renowned faculty members such as Dr. Cécile Hanon, Dr. Nicolas Hoertel, Dr. Mariana Pinto da Costa, Prof. Andrea Raballo, Prof. Norman Sartorius and Prof. Peter Falkai. This was the first time EPA Summer School centered its topic on Research in Psychiatry, giving a unique opportunity for ECPs and psychiatric trainees to enrich their knowledge and skills and to find inspiration for their future research. In this paper, we intend to share our experience and provide a perspective on what we have learned during the EPA Summer School sessions. Copyright © 2022 John Libbey Eurotext. L’université d’été de l’Association européenne de psychiatrie (EPA) est un programme intensif organisé depuis 10 ans par le Comité de l’éducation de l’EPA et permet à des stagiaires en psychiatrie et à des psychiatres en début de carrière (ECP) sélectionnés dans toute l’Europe de se rencontrer, de créer des réseaux et d’apprendre ensemble. Après l’annulation de l’édition 2020 en raison de la pandémie de Covid-19, l’édition 2021 s’est tenue en ligne et a poursuivi la mission éducative de l’EPA dans une approche innovante et actualisée. Vingt-et-un participants de 16 pays différents ont été sélectionnés par le comité d’éducation de l’EPA. Pendant les deux jours de formation, les participants ont participé à des activités éducatives fondamentales dispensées par des professeurs renommés tels que le Dr Cécile Hanon, le Dr Nicolas Hoertel, le Dr Mariana Pinto da Costa, le Pr Andrea Raballo, le Pr Norman Sartorius et le Pr Peter Falkai. C’était la première fois que l’école d’été de l’EPA centrait son sujet sur la recherche en psychiatrie, donnant ainsi une occasion unique aux ECP et aux stagiaires en psychiatrie d’enrichir leurs connaissances et leurs compétences et de trouver une inspiration pour leurs futures recherches. Dans cet article, nous avons l’intention de partager notre expérience et de fournir une perspective sur ce que nous avons appris pendant les sessions de l’école d’été de l’EPA. © 2022 John Libbey Eurotext. All rights reserved.

The New Precision Stewards?

The precision health era is likely to reduce and respond to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our stewardship and precision efforts share terminology, seeking to deliver the "right drug, at the right dose, at the right time." Already, rapid diagnostic testing, phylogenetic surveillance, and real-time outbreak response provide just a few examples of molecular advances we dub "precision stewardship." However, the AMR causal factors range from the molecular to that of global health policy. Mirroring the cross-sectoral nature of AMR science, the research addressing the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of AMR ranges across academic scholarship. As the rise of AMR is accompanied by an escalating sense of its moral and social significance, what is needed is a parallel field of study. In this paper, we offer a gap analysis of this terrain, or an agenda for "the ELSI of precision stewardship." In the first section, we discuss the accomplishments of a multi-decade U.S. national investment in ELSI research attending to the advances in human genetics. In the next section, we provide an overview of distinct ELSI topics pertinent to AMR. The distinctiveness of an ELSI agenda for precision stewardship suggests new opportunities for collaboration to build the stewardship teams of the future.

Preventing fraud in biomedical research.

Scientific fraud represents, to varying degrees, an increasingly important part of medical literature and is estimated to make up nearly 20% of this literature. The increase in the number of articles accessible in preprint without peer review during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increase in the accessibility of fraudulent articles. In recent years, the viral increase in the number of predatory journals has contributed to polluting the scientific literature with articles whose content is unverifiable. Given the international nature of biomedical research, there is an urgent need to define unequivocally what is considered scientific fraud. In order to counter scientific misconduct, national and supranational procedures should be implemented to inform researchers at the beginning of their medical and biomedical training. Ethics commissions should implement local procedures for monitoring ongoing research. Finally, the fight against predatory journals requires information for researchers and the availability of tools to identify these journals.

Disrupting Six/Eya Signalling as New Therapy for Lung Fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is the most common type of interstitial lung disease, with a median survival of 2-4 years from the time of diagnosis [1]. It is estimated that the prevalence of IPF in the US is approximately 10-60 cases per 100,000 people, with limited pharmacological therapies available [2, 3]. IPF is a chronic, progressive disease characterized by alveolar injury, increased extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition and resultant alveolar destruction. Macroscopically, this leads to poor lung compliance, impaired trans-alveolocapillary membrane gas exchange and ultimately, end-stage respiratory failure, necessitating lung transplantation [2, 4, 5]. Several non-genetic risk factors, such as male sex, older age, and smoking, increase the risk of developing IPF [4, 6]. More recently, several genetic risk factors for IPF have also been discovered, including a single-nucleotide polymorphism (rs35705950) in the promoter region of MUC5B [7-9], which codes for an essential protein for airway clearance and innate immune response, along with genes associated with telomere maintenance, such as telomerase RNA component (TERC) and telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) [1, 10].

The Power of Patient Engagement With Electronic Health Records as Research Participants.

Electronic health record (EHR) technology has become a central digital health tool throughout health care. EHR systems are responsible for a growing number of vital functions for hospitals and providers. More recently, patient-facing EHR tools are allowing patients to interact with their EHR and connect external sources of health data, such as wearable fitness trackers, personal genomics, and outside health services, to it. As patients become more engaged with their EHR, the volume and variety of digital health information will serve an increasingly useful role in health care and health research. Particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability for the biomedical research community to pivot to fully remote research, driven largely by EHR data capture and other digital health tools, is an exciting development that can significantly reduce burden on study participants, improve diversity in clinical research, and equip researchers with more robust clinical data. In this viewpoint, we describe how patient engagement with EHR technology is poised to advance the digital clinical trial space, an innovative research model that is uniquely accessible and inclusive for study participants.

Communicating research evidence to boards in health and care organisations: A scoping study.

Boards in health and care organisations in England play a key role in the governance, strategy, direction and culture of an organisation. It is therefore important to ensure that board decisions are informed by the best available evidence from a range of sources, including service evaluations, organisational performance data, research and evidence-based guidelines. However, there is a scarcity of evidence about how boards use research evidence, defined as evidence stemming from generalisable empirical research, to carry out their roles. THIS Institute commissioned RAND Europe and the Health Services Management Centre (HSMC) at the University of Birmingham to conduct a scoping study on how health and care boards use research evidence. The focus was on NHS Trust boards and the boards of Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) or Integrated Care Systems (ICSs). The principal data collection method was qualitative interviews with diverse members of health and care boards to obtain insights into the perceptions and experiences of board members in a range of roles and circumstances. The findings are predominantly based on evidence from 17 interviews. Given the importance of the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of this research, we were also asked to consider whether and how research evidence was used by boards in shaping their response to COVID-19. We focused on two areas specifically: (i) personal protective equipment (PPE) and (ii) the use of remote consultations and remote patient monitoring.

First person – Abdulsalam Isiaku

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Abdulsalam Isiaku is first author on ‘ Transient, flexible gene editing in zebrafish neutrophils and macrophages for determination of cell-autonomous functions’, published in DMM. Abdulsalam is a PhD candidate/graduate student in the lab of Prof. Graham Lieschke at Monash University, Clayton, Australia, investigating the role of phagocytes in inflammatory and infectious diseases.

From Africanizing oncology to decolonizing global health: reflections on the biomedical turn in African health histories

The questions and preoccupations animating this book were not so much about decolonizing global health as they were about how to write with sensitivity, honesty and integrity about the history of biomedical research and care in Eastern Africa. The theoretical architecture of the book was informed by discussions of experiments travelling 1 and the promises and shortcomings of the antiretroviral technofix for HIV. 2 I also engaged with scholars writing about the material realities of biomedicine in Africa, including debris, 3 traces, 4 improvisation, 5 capacity, 6 scrambling for Africa, 7 and Africa as a living laboratory. 8 ‘Decolonization’ was not on my radar. In the book, I write that we have ‘so much to learn from how Ugandan physician intellectuals, fieldworkers savvy in forging friendships, resilient patients, and invested caretakers keep things going: be they buildings, bodies, experiments, kitchens, therapeutics, blood banks, or optimism’ (p. 24).

Is It Time to Restructure the National Institutes of Health or Research Mindsets?

[...]the NIH has major programs in (nonbiomedical) areas such as ethical, legal, and social implications of disease;implementation science;research communication and dissemination;and capacity development and research strengthening. [...]the apparent assumption that the NIH should be funding all types of research is confusing. [...]ifthere are in fact policy community frustrations, we would see declining funding to the NIH, but in fact funding has gone up, even in the most recent allocations.6 The discussion of trust in scientific knowledge, although based on a philosophical approach and theoretically tenable, ignores the current reality of how trust in science has broken down in practice in the contemporary era owing to what can be termed unfettered inclusion of raw opinions, ideology, and racism. The proposal for new institutes along two axes-determinants and processes-is a limited perspective from a multiepistemic view and suffers from some of the issues raised by the authors (e.g., misclassification of behavioral and social determinants, overlap and duplication between research focused on health systems, health services, populations, and communities). [...]it is unclear what a priori criteria (or principles) would be used to evaluate such a system, especially given that no existing research funding system (anywhere in the world) has been suggested as a model.

Is It Time to Restructure the National Institutes of Health?

[...]NIH practices that propagate epistemic exclusion will likely permeate elsewhere. [...]NIH needs to lead on reducing epistemic exclusion related to race, discipline, and beyond. [...]implement and test new options to determine the impact on epistemic exclusion, improved health outcomes, and unintended consequences. [...]the NIH receives bipartisan support, which could be jeopardized if restructured. [...]the NIH already includes mechanisms of restructuring, as evidenced by (1) the formation of the NIMHD,14'15 which provides pathways for historically marginalized groups and methods to be incorporated within the NIH;(2) the UNITE initiative to end structural racism13;(3) study section composition changes that sought to expand disciplinary representation: and ( 4) 1!IH embracing open science pm/Tices, including citizen science.

Photonic resonator interferometric scattering microscopy

Interferometric scattering microscopy is a newly emerging alternative to fluorescence microscopy in biomedical research and diagnostic testing due to its ability to detect nano-objects such as individual proteins, extracellular vesicles, and virions individually through their intrinsic elastic light scattering. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio, we developed photonic resonator interferometric scattering microscopy (PRISM) in which a photonic crystal (PC) resonator is used as the sample substrate. The scattered light is amplified by the PC through resonant near-field enhancement, which then interferes with the <1% transmitted light to create intensity contrast. Importantly, the scattered photons assume the wavevectors defined by PC's photonic band structure, resulting in the ability to utilize a non-immersion objective without significant loss at illumination density as low as 25 W/cm2. We demonstrate virus and protein detection, including highly selective capture and counting of intact pseudotype SARS-CoV-2 from saliva with sensitivity equivalent to conventional nucleic acid tests. The results showcase the promise of nanophotonic surfaces in the development of resonance-enhanced interferometric microscopies, and as a single step, room temperature, and rapid viral detection technology. © 2022 SPIE.