Role of genomics and transcriptomics in selection of reintroduction source populations

The use and importance of reintroduction as a conservation tool to return a species to its historical range where it has become extirpated will only increase as climate change and human development accelerate habitat loss and population extinctions. Although the number of reintroduction attempts has rapidly increased over the past two decades, the success rate is generally low. As a result of population differences in fitness-related traits and divergent responses to environmental stresses, there is a high likelihood for differential performance among potential source populations upon reintroduction. It is well known that population performance upon reintroduction is highly variable and it is generally agreed that selecting an appropriate source population is a critical component of a successful reintroduction

Patterns of Tumor Necrosis Factor Inhibitor (TNFi) Biosimilar Use Across United States Rheumatology Practices.

ObjectiveIt is unclear if biosimilars of biologics for inflammatory arthritis are realizing their promise to increase competition and improve accessibility. This study evaluates biosimilar tumor necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi) utilization across rheumatology practices in the United States and compares whether patients initiating biosimilars remain on these treatments at least as long as new initiators of bio-originators.MethodsWe identified a cohort of patients initiating a TNFi biosimilar between January 2017 and September 2018 from an electronic health record registry containing data from 218 rheumatology practices and over 1 million rheumatology patients in the United States. We also identified a cohort of patients who initiated the bio-originator TNFi during the same period. We calculated the proportion of biosimilar prescriptions compared with other TNFi's and compared persistence on these therapies, adjusting for age, sex, diagnoses codes, and insurance type.ResultsWe identified 909 patients prescribed the biosimilar infliximab-dyyb, the only biosimilar prescribed, and 4413 patients with a new prescription for the bio-originator infliximab. Biosimilar patients tended to be older, have a diagnosis code for rheumatoid arthritis, and covered by Medicare insurance. Over the study period, biosimilar prescriptions reached a maximum of 3.5% of all TNFi prescriptions. Patients persisted on the biosimilar at least as long as the bio-originator infliximab (hazard ratio [HR] 0.83, P = 0.07).ConclusionThe uptake of biosimilars in the United States remains low despite persistence on infliximab-dyyb being similar to the infliximab bio-originator. These results add to clinical studies that should provide greater confidence to patients and physicians regarding biosimilar use

Detecting Communities in a Gossip Model with Stubborn Agents

We consider a community detection problem for a gossip model, in which agents randomly interact pairwise, and there are stubborn agents never changing their states. Such a model can illustrate how disagreement and opinion fluctuation arise in a social network. It is assumed that each agent is assigned with one of the two community labels, and the agents interact with probabilities depending on their labels. The considered problem is twofold: to infer the community labels of agents, and to estimate interaction probabilities between the agents, based on a single trajectory of the model. We first study stability and limit theorems of the model, and then propose a joint detection and estimation algorithm based on agent states. It is verified that the community detector of the algorithm converges in finite time, and the interaction estimator converges almost surely. We derive a sample-complexity result for successful community detection, and analyze convergence rate of the interaction estimator. Simulations are presented for illustration of the performance of the proposed algorithm