Health utilities in burn injury survivors: A systematic review.

BACKGROUND: An estimated 11 million burn injuries with medical attention occur every year worldwide. Although potentially deadly, burn injuries are now considered a chronic disease with multiple lifetime physical and psychological sequelae. However, it remains unclear how these events affect patients' utility scores. We aimed to conduct a systematic review to summarize the utility scores of burn injury survivors. METHODS: We conducted on March 18th, 2020 a systematic review of the published literature using a search strategy designed in collaboration with a research librarian. Our search strategy aimed to identify studies that provided burn injury survivors' utility scores via a standardized indirect instrument. RESULTS: We identified 15 studies that reported burn injury survivors' utility scores. Most studies used the EQ-5D instruments to assess patients' utility scores. Results varied substantially between studies, ranging from a low of 0.06 to a high of 0.972. Our review identified two key trends. First, utility scores seem to be negatively correlated with the severity of the burn injury. Second, utility scores in adults tend to increase in function of the time since injury. CONCLUSION: Unfortunately, due to differences in study design and settings, patient populations and instruments used to assess patients' utility scores, we were unable to combine all study results into a single value. In spite of this limit, results we identified support previous trends identified by others regarding the relationship between utility scores and the burn injury severity and/or the time since injury.

Marker-free coselection for CRISPR-driven genome editing in human cells.

Targeted genome editing enables the creation of bona fide cellular models for biological research and may be applied to human cell-based therapies. Therefore, broadly applicable and versatile methods for increasing its efficacy in cell populations are highly desirable. We designed a simple and robust coselection strategy for enrichment of cells with either nuclease-driven nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) or homology-directed repair (HDR) events by harnessing the multiplexing capabilities of CRISPR-Cas9 and Cpf1 systems. Selection for dominant alleles of the ubiquitous sodium/potassium pump (Na+/K+ ATPase) that rendered cells resistant to ouabain was used to enrich for custom genetic modifications at another unlinked locus of interest, thereby effectively increasing the recovery of engineered cells. The process is readily adaptable to transformed and primary cells, including hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. The use of universal CRISPR reagents and a commercially available small-molecule inhibitor streamlines the incorporation of marker-free genetic changes in human cells.