Design and baseline characteristics of the finerenone in reducing cardiovascular mortality and morbidity in diabetic kidney disease trial

Background: Among people with diabetes, those with kidney disease have exceptionally high rates of cardiovascular (CV) morbidity and mortality and progression of their underlying kidney disease. Finerenone is a novel, nonsteroidal, selective mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist that has shown to reduce albuminuria in type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) while revealing only a low risk of hyperkalemia. However, the effect of finerenone on CV and renal outcomes has not yet been investigated in long-term trials. Patients and Methods: The Finerenone in Reducing CV Mortality and Morbidity in Diabetic Kidney Disease (FIGARO-DKD) trial aims to assess the efficacy and safety of finerenone compared to placebo at reducing clinically important CV and renal outcomes in T2D patients with CKD. FIGARO-DKD is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group, event-driven trial running in 47 countries with an expected duration of approximately 6 years. FIGARO-DKD randomized 7,437 patients with an estimated glomerular filtration rate >= 25 mL/min/1.73 m(2) and albuminuria (urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio >= 30 to <= 5,000 mg/g). The study has at least 90% power to detect a 20% reduction in the risk of the primary outcome (overall two-sided significance level alpha = 0.05), the composite of time to first occurrence of CV death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, or hospitalization for heart failure. Conclusions: FIGARO-DKD will determine whether an optimally treated cohort of T2D patients with CKD at high risk of CV and renal events will experience cardiorenal benefits with the addition of finerenone to their treatment regimen. Trial Registration: EudraCT number: 2015-000950-39; ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02545049

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

Service-dominant logic and supply chain management: are we there yet?

Purpose: Research suggests that service-dominant logic (SDL) is well suited to support supply chain management (SCM) research and practice. Qualitative research has shown that SDL is particularly consistent with an outcome-based supply chain strategy known as performance-based logistics (PBL). The purpose of this paper is to extend theory and practice by exploring the degree to which SDL is utilized in practice. Specifically, PBL is examined for consistency with the underlying fundamental premises (FPs) of SDL. In doing so, this paper answers the positive question, “what exists”, at the intersection of SDL and SCM. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study employs a mixed methodological approach. First, the FPs of SDL are operationalized using the language of PBL. The PBL FPs are tested quantitatively through an online survey of 52 supply chain PBL experts. A qualitative analysis is conducted using comments associated with each premise. Findings: The survey results suggest that PBL is consistent with SDL. These results indicate that PBL is a supply chain context of SDL. Originality/Value: This is one of the first works to examine the degree to which SDL concepts are being utilized in practice

Foodborne pathogens and host predilection

During food manufacturing, the potential exists for contamination of products with pathogenic microorganisms. While the ingestion of a bacterial pathogen will typically result in illness in a susceptible host, it is not the case for each strain within a given species. Pathogenic bacteria display various levels of host specificity: some infect a wide range of hosts, while others have strict host selectivity and are obligate pathogens. Host specificity of bacterial pathogens is determined by multiple molecular interactions between both the pathogens and their hosts. Understanding these interactions in detail will allow risk-based decisions to be made on affected foods, informed by knowledge of specific strains or pathotypes. This has the potential to avoid costly and unnecessary recalls with classical pathogens that can be proved to have a low potential for causing illness