The burdens of cancer therapy

Abstract

Two types of ionic modification approaches (i.e., sulfonation and triethylamination) were applied with the aid of dual‐layer hollow fiber technology in this work to fine tune the pore size and pore size distribution, introduce the electrostatic interaction, and reduce membrane fouling for long‐term high‐performance protein separation. A binary protein mixture comprising bovine serum albumin (BSA) and hemoglobin (Hb) was separated in this work. The sulfonated fiber exhibits an improved BSA/Hb separation factor at pH = 6.8 compared with as‐spun fibers but at the expense of BSA sieving coefficient. On the other hand, the triethylaminated fiber reveals the best and most durable separation performance at pH = 4.8. Its BSA/Hb separation factor is maintained above 80 for 4 days and maximum BSA sieving coefficient reaches 33%. Therefore, this study documents that an intelligent combination of both size‐exclusion and electrostatic interaction can synergistically enhance protein separation performance in both purity and concentration. © 2008 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2009

Early economic evaluation ot technologies for emerging interventions to personalize breast cancer treatment

“…18 F-FDG-PET/CT showed promising performance results also in TNBC by both ΔSUV max and ΔTLG measurement (AUC values of 0.86 and 0.88 respectively [41] and overall accuracy of 75% [43]). The potential of ΔTLG as an outcome for 18 F-FDG-PET/CT was confirmed by other research groups, whom showed its correlation with survival [41,44]. In addition, the use of absolute values of SUVmax and SUV peak instead of their difference was also suggested for their better performance in predicting pCR [41].…”

“…Early health economic modeling is a method recommended to identify and characterize the uncertainty that is inherent in the early stages of technology development, as it accounts for parameters that are likely to vary and it combines data from different sources [43,44]. The models were designed for two purposes; 1) to inform on go/no-go decisions via early CEAs, i.e.…”

“…Following the recommendations by Briggs et al [24], a beta distribution was assigned to binomial data, such as biomarkers' prevalence, PPVs, tps and TRRs in biomarker negative and TNBC patients, and a log-normal distribution to rightly skewed data, such as costs. For uncertainty in mean utilities, we followed Brennan et al [44], suggesting the use of a normal distribution. As sampling from one utility distribution (HDAC)…”

“…To this figure, an annual discount rate of 4% was applied over a 10-year time horizon of the technology, assumed to be the period during which 4 the information is relevant to inform the decision. The EVPPI requires two-level Monte Carlo simulation [24], beginning with an outer loop (100) sampling values from the distribution of the parameters of interest, and an inner loop (1000) sampling the remaining parameters from their conditional distribution [44]. The parameters groups of interests were determined based on the type of study design required for further research: 1) RCT to inform the tp, 2) QoL survey to provide further information regarding utility weights associated with chemotherapy and breast cancer health-states, 3) longitudinal costing study to provide more information on resource use of the tests, the chemotherapy and the health-states, and 4) longitudinal study to provide more information on the biomarkers' prevalence, PPVs, and the TRRs of biomarker negative and TNBC patients [24].…”

“…Almost all early HTA articles reported on the comparative effectiveness of testing techniques [43][44][45][46][47]. Only one article presented an early stage cost-effectiveness analysis [48].…”