Chagas disease (CD) is a tropical neglected illness, affecting mainly populations of low socioeconomic status in Latin America. An estimated 6 to 8 million people worldwide are infected with Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of CD. Despite being one of the main global health problems, this disease continues without effective treatment during the chronic phase of the infection. The limitation of therapeutic strategies has been one of the biggest challenges on the fight against CD. Nifurtimox and benznidazole, developed in the 1970s, are still the only commercial options with established efficacy on CD. However, the efficacy of these drugs have a proven efficacy only during early infection and the benefits in the chronic phase are questionable. Consequently, there is a growing need for new pharmacological alternatives, either by optimization of existing drugs or by the formulation of new compounds. In the present study, a literature review of the currently adopted therapy, its concomitant combination with other drugs, and potential future treatments for CD was performed, considering articles published from 2012. The revised articles were selected according to the protocol of treatment: evaluation of drug association, drug repositioning and research of new drugs. As a result of the present revision, it was possible to conclude that the use of benznidazole in combination with other compounds showed better results when compared with its use as a single therapy. The search of new drugs has been the strategy most used in pursuing more effective forms of treatment for CD. However, studies have still focused on basic research, that is, they are still in a pre-clinical stage, using methodologies based on in vitro or in animal studies.
A jurisprudence search system is a solution that makes available to its users a set of decisions made by public bodies on the recurring understanding as a way of understanding the law. In the similarity of legal decisions, jurisprudence seeks subsidies that provide stability, uniformity, and some predictability in the analysis of a case decided. This paper presents a proposed solution architecture for the jurisprudence search system of the Brazilian Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), with a view to building and expanding the knowledge generated regarding the economic defense of competition to support the agency’s final procedural business activities. We conducted a literature review and a survey to investigate the characteristics and functionalities of the jurisprudence search systems used by Brazilian public administration agencies. Our findings revealed that the prevailing technologies of Brazilian agencies in developing jurisdictional search systems are Java programming language and Apache Solr as the main indexing engine. Around 87% of the jurisprudence search systems use machine learning classification. On the other hand, the systems do not use too many artificial intelligence and morphological construction techniques. No agency participating in the survey claimed to use ontology to treat structured and unstructured data from different sources and formats.
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