From private incentives to public health need: rethinking research and development for pandemic preparedness.

Pandemic preparedness and response have relied primarily on market dynamics to drive development and availability of new health products. Building on calls for transformation, we propose a new value proposition that instead prioritises equity from the research and development (R&D) stage and that strengthens capacity to control outbreaks when and where they occur. Key elements include regional R&D hubs free to adapt well established technology platforms, and independent clinical trials networks working with researchers, regulators, and health authorities to better study questions of comparative benefit and real-world efficacy. Realising these changes requires a shift in emphasis: from pandemic response to outbreak control, from one-size-fits-all economies of scale to R&D and manufacture for local need, from de novo product development to last-mile innovation through adaptation of existing technologies, and from proprietary, competitive R&D to open science and financing for the common good that supports collective management and sharing of technology and know-how.

Exosome Processing and Characterization Approaches for Research and Technology Development.

Exosomes are extracellular vesicles that share components of their parent cells and are attractive in biotechnology and biomedical research as potential disease biomarkers as well as therapeutic agents. Crucial to realizing this potential is the ability to manufacture high-quality exosomes; however, unlike biologics such as proteins, exosomes lack standardized Good Manufacturing Practices for their processing and characterization. Furthermore, there is a lack of well-characterized reference exosome materials to aid in selection of methods for exosome isolation, purification, and analysis. This review informs exosome research and technology development by comparing exosome processing and characterization methods and recommending exosome workflows. This review also provides a detailed introduction to exosomes, including their physical and chemical properties, roles in normal biological processes and in disease progression, and summarizes some of the on-going clinical trials.

Model-based assessment of mammalian cell metabolic functionalities using omics data.

Omics experiments are ubiquitous in biological studies, leading to a deluge of data. However, it is still challenging to connect changes in these data to changes in cell functions because of complex interdependencies between genes, proteins, and metabolites. Here, we present a framework allowing researchers to infer how metabolic functions change on the basis of omics data. To enable this, we curated and standardized lists of metabolic tasks that mammalian cells can accomplish. Genome-scale metabolic networks were used to define gene sets associated with each metabolic task. We further developed a framework to overlay omics data on these sets and predict pathway usage for each metabolic task. We demonstrated how this approach can be used to quantify metabolic functions of diverse biological samples from the single cell to whole tissues and organs by using multiple transcriptomic datasets. To facilitate its adoption, we integrated the approach into GenePattern (www.genepattern.org-CellFie).

The changing role of health-oriented international organizations and nongovernmental organizations.

Apart from governments, there are many other actors active in the health policy arena, including a wide array of international organizations (IOs), public-private partnerships and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that state as their main mission to improve the health of (low-income) populations of low-income countries. Despite the steady rise in numbers and prominence of NGOs, however, there is lack of empirical knowledge about their functioning in the international policy arena, and most studies focus on the larger organizations. This has also caused a somewhat narrow focus of theoretical studies. Some scholars applied the 'principal-agent' theory to study the origins of IOs, for example, other focus on changing power relations. Most of those studies implicitly assume that IOs, public-private partnerships and large NGOs act as unified and rational actors, ignoring internal fragmentation and external pressure to change directions. We assert that the classic analytical instruments for understanding the shaping and outcome of public policy: ideas, interests and institutions apply well to the study of IOs. As we will show, changing ideas about the proper role of state and non-state actors, changing positions and activities of major stakeholders in the (international) health policy arena, and shifts in political institutions that channel the voice of diverging interests resulted in (and reflected) the changing positions of the health-oriented organizations-and also affect their future outlook. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.