The emphasis in human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) technologies has shifted from cell therapy to in vitro disease modelling and drug screening. This review examines why this shift has occurred, and how current technological limitations might be overcome to fully realise the potential of hPSCs. Details are provided for all disease‐specific human induced pluripotent stem cell lines spanning a dozen dysfunctional organ systems. Phenotype and pharmacology have been examined in only 17 of 63 lines, primarily those that model neurological and (...) cardiac conditions. Drug screening is most advanced in hPSC‐cardiomyocytes. Responses for almost 60 agents include examples of how careful tests in hPSC‐cardiomyocytes have improved on existing in vitro assays, and how these cells have been integrated into high throughput imaging and electrophysiology industrial platforms. Such successes will provide an incentive to overcome bottlenecks in hPSC technology such as improving cell maturity and industrial scalability whilst reducing cost. (shrink)

Semantic interoperability requires the use of standards, not only for Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to be transferred and structurally mapped into a receiving repository, but also for the clinical content of the EHR to be interpreted in conformity with the original meanings intended by its authors. Accurate and complete clinical documentation, faithful to the patient’s situation, and interoperability between systems, require widespread and dependable access to published and maintained collections of coherent and quality-assured semantic resources, including models such as (...) archetypes and templates that would (1) provide clinical context, (2) be mapped to interoperability standards for EHR data, (3) be linked to well specified, multi-lingual terminology value sets, and (4) be derived from high quality ontologies. Wide-scale engagement with professional bodies, globally, is needed to develop these clinical information standards. (shrink)

An unambiguous absence in the study of South Asian diasporized populations occurs when considering popular cultural forms. Writing for the `Other' rather than reading and listening to their texts has marked anthropological and other social science discourse. Beginning to fill in the void, this article focuses on the musical form Bhangra and its specific articulation in diasporized domains. A close consideration of the lyrical and musical context of a number of song texts brings forward a number of themes. At the (...) centre of these songs is the experience of migration and its social and political consequences. (shrink)

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a developmental disorder with an age onset prior to 7 years. Children with ADHD have significantly lower ability to focus and sustain attention and also score higher on impulsivity and hyperactivity. Stimulants, such as methylphenidate, have remained the mainstay of ADHD treatment for decades with evidence supporting their use. However, recent years have seen emergence of newer drugs and drug delivery systems, like osmotic release oral systems and transdermal patches, to mention a few. The use (...) of nonstimulant drugs like atomoxetine and various other drugs, such as a-agonists, and a few antidepressants, being used in an off-label manner, have added to the pharmacotherapy of ADHD. This review discusses current trends in drug therapy of ADHD and highlights the promise pharmacogenomics may hold in the future. (shrink)

Psychiatric polypharmacy refers to the prescription of two or more psychiatric medications concurrently to a patient. It can be categorised as same-class, multi-class, adjunctive, augmentation and total polypharmacy. Despite advances in psychopharmacology and a better understanding of the principles of therapeutics, its practice is increasing rapidly. The prevalence of polypharmacy in psychiatry varies between 13%-90%. There are various clinical and pharmaco-economic factors associated with it. Dealing with polypharmacy requires an understanding of its associated factors. Education, guidelines and algorithms for the (...) appropriate management of various conditions are effective ways to avoid irrational polypharmacy. (shrink)

Insecticide resistance management (IRM) programme was launched in 26 cotton-growing districts of India in 2002 to rationalize the use of pesticides. The IRM strategy is presented within a full Integrated Pest Management (IPM) context with the premise that unless full-fledged efforts to understand all aspects of resistance phenomenon are made, any attempt to implement IPM at field level would not bear results. Unlike earlier IPM programmes, this programme is directly implemented by the scientists of state agricultural universities; thus the information (...) flow is directly from research subsystem to farmers. The extension methodology is different from IPM-farmer field school model, but much the same information is provided in didactic form, through active participation of the farmers throughout the cotton-growing season, by deploying scouts in villages. The knowledge gain of the farmers covered under IRM programme was measured by employing before/after quasi-experimental research design. The overall knowledge gain was significant in terms of identification of insect pests and natural enemies of cotton crop, proper use of insecticides and timely sowing of the crop, but farmers did not reach the desired level of knowledge with respect to other cultural practices, which result in suppression of pest buildup. In the absence of any effective bio-agents, the level of IPM integration is limited to cultural practices, thresholds, agro ecosystem analysis and use of insecticides according to good agricultural practices. (shrink)

As health systems around the world turn towards highly distributed, specialized and cooperative structures to increase quality and safety of care as well as efficiency and efficacy of delivery processes, there is a growing need for supporting communication and collaboration of all parties involved with advanced ICT solutions. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) provides the information platform which is maturing towards the eHealth core application. To meet the requirements for sustainable, semantically interoperable, and trustworthy EHR solutions, different standards and different (...) national strategies have been established. The workshop summarizes the requirements for such advanced EHR systems and their underlying architecture, presents different strategies and solutions advocated by corresponding protagonists, discusses pros and cons as well as harmonization and migration strategies for those approaches. It particularly highlights a turn towards ontology-driven architectures. (shrink)

The European Medical Information Framework project, funded through the IMI programme, has designed and implemented a federated platform to connect health data from a variety of sources across Europe, to facilitate large scale clinical and life sciences research. It enables approved users to analyse securely multiple, diverse, data via a single portal, thereby mediating research opportunities across a large quantity of research data. EMIF developed a code of practice to ensure the privacy protection of data subjects, protect the interests of (...) data sharing parties, comply with legislation and various organisational policies on data protection, uphold best practices in the protection of personal privacy and information governance, and eventually promote these best practices more widely. EMIF convened an Ethics Advisory Board, to provide feedback on its approach, platform, and the EcoP. The most important challenges the ECoP team faced were: how to define, control and monitor the purposes for which federated health data are used; the kinds of organisation that should be permitted to conduct permitted research; and how to monitor this. This manuscript explores those issues, offering the combined insights of the EAB and EMIF core ECoP team. For some issues, a consensus on how to approach them is proposed. For other issues, a singular approach may be premature but the challenges are summarised to help the community to debate the topic further. Arguably, the issues and their analyses have application beyond EMIF, to many research infrastructures connected to health data sources. (shrink)

In the management of biomedical data, vocabularies such as ontologies and terminologies (O/Ts) are used for (i) domain knowledge representation and (ii) interoperability. The knowledge representation role supports the automated reasoning on, and analysis of, data annotated with O/Ts. At an interoperability level, the use of a communal vocabulary standard for a particular domain is essential for large data repositories and information management systems to communicate consistently with one other. Consequently, the interoperability benefit of selecting a particular O/T as a (...) standard for data exchange purposes is often seen by the end-user as a function of the number of applications using that vocabulary (and, by extension, the size of the user base). Furthermore, the adoption of an O/T as an interoperability standard requires confidence in its stability and guaranteed continuity as a resource. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of dehumanization in the workplace and attempts to offer directions to restore the balance between ‘results’ and ‘relations’ in organizations: The author has drawn inspiration from the classical Indian concept of spandan (vibration) and translates it into actionable values for integral development of the human being at three levels—interpersonal, institutional and cosmic. Using insights from empirical work done in Indian organizations, the author advocates a maternalistic style of management based on human values against the (...) backdrop of an overaching unitarian (advaita) philosophy for evolving holistic management principles and practices in future. (shrink)

In his essay “Of Other Spaces” Michel Foucault explained that heterotopias, or spaces of otherness, “function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” This temporal otherness he described as “heterochrony.” In this article I will draw on the Sartrean ontology of the human being as temporal ecstasis to explain the transcultural phenomenon of hybridity as heterochrony, and in particular, how hybrid temporality is out of sync with local temporality. Heeding Virinder (...) class='Hi'>Kalra, Raminder Kaur, and John Hutnyk's admonishment that “hybridity is better conceived of as a process rather than a description,” I will attempt to explicate the multiple processes of hybrid becomings I witnessed as an academic migrant in Cambodia, Hawaii, and Nigeria, and as a member of a hybrid subculture in Singapore. (shrink)