[Availability and need for population of the federal districts in hospital beds].

Providing the population with the necessary bed stock is an important task of public health. In order to compare the level of security and the population's need for hospital beds in the territory of the Federal districts of Russia, the study used the following methods: analytical, logical and descriptive statistics. Data on the population and bed Fund were taken from the official reports of Rosstat and the Ministry of health of Russia for 2016-2018. The population's need for hospital beds was calculated as the ratio of the product of the number of bed days per 1000 inhabitants and the population to the average annual bed occupancy multiplied by 1000. In the course of the study, the dynamics of the reduction of the bed stock in various profiles was identified and the population's need for hospital beds was determined, taking into account various variants of the population forecast. It was found that the optimization of hospital beds, in addition to economic interests, should be considered opportunities for providing outpatient and inpatient care, improve efficiency and quality of hospital care, as well as the necessity of forming a reserve of hospital beds in case of mass sanitary losses or increase the level of hospitalization of citizens in a short period of time.

New somatostatin-drug conjugates for effective targeting pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer poorly responds to available drugs, and finding novel approaches to target this cancer type is of high significance. Here, based on a common property of pancreatic cancer cells to express somatostatin receptors (SSTR), we designed drug conjugates with novel somatostatin-derived cyclic peptides (SSTp) with broad selectivity towards SSTR types to facilitate drug targeting of the pancreatic cancer cells specifically. Uptake of our newly designed SSTps was facilitated by SSTRs expressed in the pancreatic cancers, including SSTR2, SSTR3, SSTR4 and SSTR5. Three major drugs were conjugated to our best SSTps that served as delivery vehicles, including Camptothecin (CPT), Combretastatin-4A (COMB) and Azatoxin (AZA). All designed drug conjugates demonstrated penetration to pancreatic cancer cell lines, and significant toxicity towards them. Furthermore, the drug conjugates specifically accumulated in tumors in the animal xenograft model, though some accumulation was also seen in kidney. Overall these findings lay the basis for development of novel drug series that could target the fatal pancreatic cancer.