The therapeutic use of radon: a biomedical treatment in Europe; an "alternative" remedy in the United States

There is a growing recognition in the United States and Europe that health care is driven to a significant extent by an emphasis on consumer choice and demand. As consumers, people regularly choose their own solutions for health promotion and maintenance, solutions which may or may not be sanctioned by mainstream medicine. Radioactive radon therapy exemplifies a non-sanctioned treatment eagerly sought by certain patients, but scorned or dismissed by many physicians. This is certainly the case in the United States, where well-publicized Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warnings portray radon as a potential carcinogen. Between 1997 and 2001, I worked with a population of arthritis sufferers who expose themselves to radon gas in Montana radon health mines in order to alleviate their symptoms. In this paper I discuss the decision-making process involved in using radon, and compare the Montana radon health mine facilities with selected radon mines and spas in Europe.     

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles for delivery of therapeutic agents: opportunities and challenges

Introduction: Bearing in mind that many promising drug candidates have the problem of reaching their target site, the concept of advanced drug delivery can play a significant complementary role in shaping modern medicine. Among other nanoscale drug carriers, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) have shown great potential in nanomedicine. The intrinsic properties of SPIONs, such as inherent magnetism, broad safety margin and the availability of methods for fabrication and surface engineering, pave the way for diverse biomedical applications. SPIONs can achieve the highest drug targeting efficiency among carriers, since an external magnetic field locally applied to the target organ enhances the accumulation of magnetic nanoparticles in the drug site of action. Moreover, theranostic multifunctional SPIONs make simultaneous delivery and imaging possible. In spite of these favorable qualities, there are some toxicological concerns, such as oxidative stress, unpredictable cellular responses and induction of signaling pathways, alteration in gene expression profiles and potential disturbance in iron homeostasis, that need to be carefully considered. Besides, the protein corona at the surface of the SPIONs may induce few shortcomings such as reduction of SPIONs targeting efficacy.

Areas covered: In this review, we will present recent developments of SPIONs as theranostic agents. The article will further address some barriers on drug delivery using SPIONs.

Expert opinion: One of the major success determinants in targeted in vivo drug delivery using SPIONs is the adequacy of magnetic gradient. This can be partially achieved by using superconducting magnets, local implantation of magnets and application of magnetic stents. Other issues that must be considered include the pharmacokinetics and in vivo fate of SPIONs, their biodegradability, biocompatibility, potential side effects and the crucial impact of protein corona on either drug release profile or mistargeting. Surface modification of SPIONs can open up the possibility of drug delivery to intracellular organelles, drug delivery across the blood–brain barrier, modifying metabolic diseases and a variety of other multimodal and/or theranostic applications.     

原子力显微镜在生物医学中的应用

原子力显微镜是观察样品表面结构的一种新的工具 ,它具有比传统扫描电子显微镜更高的分辨率 ,并且可以在生理条件下进行实时观察。同时在分子水平上它还是检测样品之间相互作用力的一个强有力的工具。近年来 ,原子力显微镜越来越多地应用到生物医学的各个方面 ,并且取得了很多令人鼓舞的结果     

试论当代生物医学中的道德选择

在当代生物医学领域中，存在诸多道德选择活动，随着科技的发展和生物医学中的众多新事物的涌理，生物医学面临的道德选择日益增多且日趋复杂，作者就当代生物医学道德选择的时代背景，基本特点及其核心原则做了初步探讨。     

Medical practice and anthropological bias

The purpose of this article is twofold: to describe some of the biases common to anthropological investigations of healing, particularly Biomedical healing; and to suggest that the physician-anthropologist is uniquely positioned to avoid some of these biases and to make valid contributions to the understanding of the practice of healing. Biases described are methodological (the tendency to formal-symbolic analyses rather than practical-instrumental understandings of behavior, transference and the observer effect), ontological (due to the estrangement of the anthropologist from his culture, other disciplines and his subjects, romanticization of the Other and celebration of the exotic over the mundane), and conventional or stylistic (the minimal importance given to emotional or psychological aspects of behavior, the emphasis on visual and linguistic understanding over other forms of investigation, unsophisticated use of medical texts as an indicator of clinical practice, a characteristic mode of reductionism, and the failure to elicit the responses of the subjects to interpretations made by anthropologists). As native-ethnographer, the M.D./Ph.D. physician-anthropologist may avoid some of these biases and offer complementary interpretations of healing.     

Ethics as ritual: smoothing over moments of dislocation in biomedicine

Applications of biomedical R&D currently imply substantial societal concerns. This paper explores, based on semi‐structured interviews with scientists in Norway, how biomedical researchers experience and tackle such concerns in their daily work. It shows how ritualised routine responses to dislocatory moments help maintain order in the daily work of the interviewed scientists; they do not address directly but instead smooth over concerns by a ritualised way of using ethics. This may foreclose substantive reflection and function as a stabiliser for ‘business as usual’. Overall, the current way of responding to concerns as described by the interviewees may contribute to a depoliticisation of important issues. The paper contributes to sociological work on ethics by linking it to recent discussions on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and by the empirical research presented. The insights can also help improve science policies such as RRI.     

Evaluating semantic similarity between Chinese biomedical terms through multiple ontologies with score normalization: An initial study

BackgroundSemantic similarity estimation significantly promotes the understanding of natural language resources and supports medical decision making. Previous studies have investigated semantic similarity and relatedness estimation between biomedical terms through resources in English, such as SNOMED-CT or UMLS. However, very limited studies focused on the Chinese language, and technology on natural language processing and text mining of medical documents in China is urgently needed. Due to the lack of a complete and publicly available biomedical ontology in China, we only have access to several modest-sized ontologies with no overlaps. Although all these ontologies do not constitute a complete coverage of biomedicine, their coverage of their respective domains is acceptable. In this paper, semantic similarity estimations between Chinese biomedical terms using these multiple non-overlapping ontologies were explored as an initial study.MethodsTypical path-based and information content (IC)-based similarity measures were applied on these ontologies. From the analysis of the computed similarity scores, heterogeneity in the statistical distributions of scores derived from multiple ontologies was discovered. This heterogeneity hampers the comparability of scores and the overall accuracy of similarity estimation. This problem was addressed through a novel language-independent method by combining semantic similarity estimation and score normalization. A reference standard was also created in this study.ResultsCompared with the existing task-independent normalization methods, the newly developed method exhibited superior performance on most IC-based similarity measures. The accuracy of semantic similarity estimation was enhanced through score normalization. This enhancement resulted from the mitigation of heterogeneity in the similarity scores derived from multiple ontologies.ConclusionWe demonstrated the potential necessity of score normalization when estimating semantic similarity using ontology-based measures. The results of this study can also be extended to other language systems to implement semantic similarity estimation in biomedicine.     

上海生物医药研发基地现状及展望

上海市生物医药研发基地包括研发公共服务平台、上海市工程技术研究中心和上海市重点实验室,是上海市加快建设科创中心、优化科技创新布局的重要内容。作为我国生物医药领域的创新高地,在政府大力支持推动下,经多年建设和整合,上海市生物医药研发基地已经走在全国前列,具有“覆盖范围广、技术水平精、服务能效高”的特点。本文对上海市生物医药领域研发基地现状进行了梳理,并对平台未来发展提出设想和展望。