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Influenza infection results in substantial morbidity and mortality in hospitalized patients, including those who are immunocompromised or pregnant. Antiviral therapy likely provides considerable benefit to these patients, but few studies have been successfully conducted in these high-risk populations, and no drugs are specifically licensed for treating these subgroups. One of the key challenges facing novel antiviral drug development for influenza is determining the appropriate efficacy end points that would enable rapid regulatory approval for drug use in seriously ill patients, for whom risk-benefit assessments differ from those with uncomplicated illness. All available antiviral drugs currently affect viral replication, and respiratory tract viral titers correlate with both symptoms and measures of host inflammatory responses, including cytokine and chemokine expression that are likely responsible for many of the clinical symptoms. Consequently, we outline the evidence to support the use of primary virological end points in studies of antiviral agents involving patients who are hospitalized with severe influenza or those who are at high risk of severe and life-threatening disease.

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euzenat2008cInternational audiencePervasive computing aims at providing services for human beings that interact with their environment, encompassing objects and humans who reside in it. Applications must be able to take into account the context in which users evolve, e.g., physical location, social or hierarchical position, current tasks as well as related information. These applications have to deal with the dynamic integration in the environment of new, and sometimes unexpected, elements (users or devices). In turn, the environment has to provide context information to newly designed applications. We describe an architecture in which context information is distributed in the environment and context managers use semantic web technologies in order to identify and characterize available resources. The components in the environment maintain their own context expressed in RDF and described through OWL ontologies. They may communicate this information to other components, obeying a simple protocol for identifying them and determining the information they are capable to provide. We show how this architecture allows the introduction of new components and new applications without interrupting what is working. In particular, the openness of ontology description languages makes possible the extension of context descriptions and ontology matching helps dealing with independently developed ontologies