Study of morbidity, mortality and survival of low birth weight babies born in a tertiary care hospital Vadodara Gujarat

Introduction: The birth weight of an infant is strongly conditioned by health and nutritional status of mother and is an important determinant of survival, healthy growth and development of the newborn. Low Birth Weight has been defined by World Health Organization as weight at birth of less than 2500 grams. Materials and Methods: 252 babies having birth weight between 2.0 Kg to 2.5 Kg born during August 2012 to January 2013 in Jamnabai Hospital of Vadodara city were included in this prospective study of six month for assessing Survival rate and morbidity among them. Results: All 249 babies (3 drop out), who were followed up 6 months survived. Prevalence rate (sick babies) varied from 17.27 % to 41.2 %, Prevalence rate (Morbidity) varied from 18.07 % to 42.4%. Common morbidities were fever, cough, cold, diarrhea, vomiting, rash. Babies who were fully immunized had lesser morbidity compared to babies who were not fully immunized. Conclusion: The 6 months prospective study which was carried out on small sample of specific group of babies in Urban area has value that it reflects the situation of babies in middle and lower middle class families

An Improved Cell Culture Process for Production of Omalizumab

The demand for biopharmaceutical products such as monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), fusion proteins, viral vaccines, and hormones is rapidly increasing. Mammalian cell cultures with ease of process operations are adopted to get the desired product. The challenges of low productivity and impurities in the desired product can be eliminated by optimizing the process parameters. The present study focuses on the optimization of temperature with other parameters to achieve improved titer and reduced heterogeneity in Omalizumab. An anti-IgE antibody expressed in mammalian cell culture.  It is noticed that maintaining a specific temperature of 36.5° C ± 0.5 and pH 6.8± 0.1 during fed-batch cell culture provides improved quality (reduced galactosylation and reduced acidic variants) and quantity (improved titer) of the Omalizumab. Keywords: antibody, omalizumab, mammalian cells, acidic variant