Home care patients often use many medications and are prone to drug-related problems (DRPs). For the management of problems related to drug use, home care could add to the multidisciplinary expertise of general practitioners (GPs) and pharmacists. The home care observation of medication-related problems by home care employees (HOME)-instrument is paper-based and assists home care workers in reporting potential DRPs. To facilitate the multiprofessional consultation, a digital report of DRPs from the HOME-instrument and digital monitoring and consulting of DRPs between home care and general practices and pharmacies is desired. The objective of this study was to develop an electronic HOME system (eHOME), a mobile version of the HOME-instrument that includes a monitoring and a consulting system for primary care.
Drug consumption estimates are of relevance because of public health effects as well as associated criminal activities. Wastewater analysis of drug residues enables the estimation of drug consumption and drug markets. Short-term and long-term trends of cocaine, MDMA (ecstasy), amphetamine (speed) and methamphetamine (crystal meth), were studied for the city of Amsterdam. MDMA (+41%) and cocaine (+26%) showed significantly higher weekend vs. week consumption, while no differences were observed for the other drugs. The consumption of MDMA, cocaine, amphetamine and methamphetamine significantly increased between 2011 and 2019. Weekly trends emerging from wastewater analyses were supported by qualitative and quantitative data from a recreational drug use monitoring scheme. However, information collected in panel interviews within nightlife networks and surveys among visitors of pubs, clubs and festivals only partially reflected the long term increase in consumption as registered from wastewater analysis. Furthermore, methamphetamine use was not well presented in survey data, panel studies and test service samples, but could be monitored trough wastewater analysis. This illustrates that wastewater analysis can function as an early warning if use and user groups are small or difficult to reach trough other forms of research. All in all, this study illustrates that wastewater-based epidemiology is complementary to research among user groups, and vice versa. These different types of information enable to connect observed trends in total drug consumption to behaviour of users and the social context in which the use takes place as well as validate qualitative signals about (increased) consumption of psychoactive substances. Such a multi angular approach to map the illicit drug situation on local or regional scale can provide valuable information for public health.
MULTIFILE
Deze casestudie geeft inzicht in verschillende soorten kennis die kenmerkend zijn voor applied design research. Er wordt onderscheid gemaakt tussen kennis over de huidige situatie, over wenselijke alternatieven en over effectieve oplossingen om daar te komen. Ofwel, kennis hoe het is, kennis over hoe het kan zijn en kennis over hoe het zal zijn als we effectieve oplossingen toepassen. Elk van deze soorten kennis heeft andere kwaliteitscriteria.
Organ-on-a-chip technology holds great promise to revolutionize pharmaceutical drug discovery and development which nowadays is a tremendously expensive and inefficient process. It will enable faster, cheaper, physiologically relevant, and more reliable (standardized) assays for biomedical science and drug testing. In particular, it is anticipated that organ-on-a-chip technology can substantially replace animal drug testing with using the by far better models of true human cells. Despite this great potential and progress in the field, the technology still lacks standardized protocols and robust chip devices, which are absolutely needed for this technology to bring the abovementioned potential to fruition. Of particular interest is heart-on-a-chip for drug and cardiotoxicity screening. There is presently no preclinical test system predicting the most important features of cardiac safety accurately and cost-effectively. The main goal of this project is to fabricate standardized, robust generic heart-on-a-chip demonstrator devices that will be validated and further optimized to generate new physiologically relevant models to study cardiotoxicity in vitro. To achieve this goal various aspects will be considered, including (i) the search for alternative chip materials to replace PDMS, (ii) inner chip surface modification and treatment (chemistry and topology), (iii) achieving 2D/3D cardiomyocyte (long term) cell culture and cellular alignment within the chip device, (iv) the possibility of integrating in-line sensors in the devices and, finally, (v) the overall chip design. The achieved standardized heart-on-a-chip technology will be adopted by pharmaceutical industry. This proposed project offers a unique opportunity for the Netherlands, and Twente in particular, which has relevant expertise, potential, and future perspective in this field as it hosts world-leading companies pioneering various core aspects of the technology that are relevant for organs-on-chips, combined with two world-leading research institutes within the University of Twente.
Treatment of crops with insecticides remains essential because globally more than 75 billion dollars is lost through crop destruction by invasive insects. However it is accompanied by severe disadvantages including i. increasing resistance of the target insects against insecticides and ii. the undesired lethality of beneficial insects such as bees and other pollinator species. The significant reduction of insect species during the last years, at least partly caused by the presently available insecticides has also effects on insect-eating species. Last but not least the presence of residual amount of insecticides in the environment (soil and plants), because of poor (bio)degradation, is another distinct disadvantage. Therefore, the overall aim of this proposal is to design and synthesize peptide based biopesticides. This should lead to Nature inspired green alternatives for insect control because "Peptides" are the small equivalents of "proteins", that are biomolecules, which are universally present in all organisms and subject to their natural biodegradation mechanisms, as well as also chemically degraded in the soil (water, heat, UV, oxygen). Design and synthesis of these environmentally benign compounds will eventually take place in a founded company called "INNOVAPEPLINE". Evaluation of candidate peptide based biopesticides can be carried out in collaboration with a recently founded company (spin-out of the University of Glasgow) called "SOLASTA BIO" (founders professors Shireen Davies, Julian Dow and Rob Liskamp) and/or with other (third) parties such as the University of Wageningen. Upon recent identification of promising candidate compounds ("leads"), chemical optimization studies of leads will take place, followed by evaluation in field trials. In this proposal design, synthesis and chemical optimization of the biological activity of new peptides and development of methods to monitor their biodegradation rate will take place. Thereby expanding the repertoire of peptide based biopesticides. (292 words)
