AN EXPLORATORY INVESTIGATION OF THE DIGITAL ECONOMY ON FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN PAKISTAN

The delivery of financial services was revolutionized by digitization, which compelled financial institutions to adopt technology that enables them to provide the best appropriate service at a reasonable price. However, due to recent disruption in the country's financial system, financial institutions must incorporate modern technologies to help lower ineffectiveness and improve service quality. This study investigates the impact of digital economy on financial sector competence. According to literature studies, financial organizations in Pakistan are attempting to adopt and integrate digitization into their operations. Given that a generous portion of Pakistan's population is considered digitally illiterate, the number of people who signed up for and used digital financial products was staggering. Therefore, financial institutions must incorporate their business functions with pertinent technology to maintain and improve profitability. Furthermore, they must invest in digital infrastructure and human resource training to incorporate technology in providing services. Policymakers should also strengthen data security and cybercrime laws, policies, and regulations to allow market participants for free and confident operation

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Investigating the self-assembling of nicotinic hydrazide-based amphiphile into nano-range vesicles and its amphotericin B loading applications

AbstractMost of the drugs are hydrophobic and have low water solubility, therefore posing issues in their absorption and bioavailability. Nonionic surfactants improve the solubility of hydrophobic drugs by entrapping them in their lipid bilayers. Two nonionic surfactants NODNH-16 and NODNH-18 are synthesized and characterized using different techniques i.e. EI-MS, 1H NMR, and FTIR. These newly synthesized surfactants were screened for blood hemolysis assay and cell toxicity studies using the NIH/3T3 cell line to assess their biocompatibility. Then amphotericin B was loaded into niosomal vesicles, and the drug entrapment efficiency of these surfactants was measured using UV–visible spectroscopy. The morphology of drug-loaded niosomes of synthesized surfactants was investigated using AFM, and their size, polydispersity, and zeta potential were measured with the Zetasizer instrument. Finally, a simulation study was performed to determine the pattern of self-assembly of the synthesized amphiphiles. Both synthesized nonionic surfactants showed good entrapment efficiency of 60.65 ± 2.12% and 68.45 ± 2.12%, respectively. It was also confirmed that both these synthesized nonionic surfactants were safe and biocompatible and showed less blood hemolysis (i.e. 21.13 ± 2.11% and 23.32 ± 2.45%) and higher 3T3 cells’ viability at 150 µg/mL concentration as compared to Tween®-80. The antifungal potential of amphotericin B-loaded niosomes has been evaluated against unicellular multi-fungal species, which showed a promising potential for fungicidal activity. These results are substantiated by constructing a safe vehicle system for drug delivery

Religious Fasting of Muslim Patients After Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery: a Modified Delphi Consensus

Background Fasting during Ramadan is one of the five pillars of the Muslim faith. Despite the positive effects of fasting on health, there are no guidelines or clear recommendations regarding fasting after metabolic/bariatric surgery (MBS). The current study reports the result of a modified Delphi consensus among expert metabolic/bariatric surgeons with experience in managing patients who fast after MBS

Protein kinase C: An attractive target for cancer therapy

Apoptosis plays an important role during all stages of carcinogenesis and the development of chemoresistance in tumor cells may be due to their selective defects in the intracellular signaling proteins, central to apoptotic pathways. Consequently, many studies have focused on rendering the chemotherapy more effective in order to prevent chemoresistance and pre-clinical and clinical data has suggested that protein kinase C (PKC) may represent an attractive target for cancer therapy. Therefore, a complete understanding of how PKC regulates apoptosis and chemoresistance may lead to obtaining a PKC-based therapy that is able to reduce drug dosages and to prevent the development of chemoresistance