Syndromics: A Bioinformatics Approach for Neurotrauma Research

Substantial scientific progress has been made in the past 50 years in delineating many of the biological mechanisms involved in the primary and secondary injuries following trauma to the spinal cord and brain. These advances have highlighted numerous potential therapeutic approaches that may help restore function after injury. Despite these advances, bench-to-bedside translation has remained elusive. Translational testing of novel therapies requires standardized measures of function for comparison across different laboratories, paradigms, and species. Although numerous functional assessments have been developed in animal models, it remains unclear how to best integrate this information to describe the complete translational “syndrome” produced by neurotrauma. The present paper describes a multivariate statistical framework for integrating diverse neurotrauma data and reviews the few papers to date that have taken an information-intensive approach for basic neurotrauma research. We argue that these papers can be described as the seminal works of a new field that we call “syndromics”, which aim to apply informatics tools to disease models to characterize the full set of mechanistic inter-relationships from multi-scale data. In the future, centralized databases of raw neurotrauma data will enable better syndromic approaches and aid future translational research, leading to more efficient testing regimens and more clinically relevant findings

Recovery of supraspinal control of stepping via indirect propriospinal relay connections after spinal cord injury

Spinal cord injuries (SCIs) in humans and experimental animals are often associated with varying degrees of spontaneous functional recovery during the first months after injury. Such recovery is widely attributed to axons spared from injury that descend from the brain and bypass incomplete lesions, but its mechanisms are uncertain. To investigate the neural basis of spontaneous recovery, we used kinematic, physiological and anatomical analyses to evaluate mice with various combinations of spatially and temporally separated lateral hemisections with or without the excitotoxic ablation of intrinsic spinal cord neurons. We show that propriospinal relay connections that bypass one or more injury sites are able to mediate spontaneous functional recovery and supraspinal control of stepping, even when there has been essentially total and irreversible interruption of long descending supraspinal pathways in mice. Our findings show that pronounced functional recovery can occur after severe SCI without the maintenance or regeneration of direct projections from the brain past the lesion and can be mediated by the reorganization of descending and propriospinal connections. Targeting interventions toward augmenting the remodeling of relay connections may provide new therapeutic strategies to bypass lesions and restore function after SCI and in other conditions such as stroke and multiple sclerosis

Value co-creation in multinational enterprises’ services marketing at the bottom-of-the-pyramid markets

This book chapter addresses determinants of value creation by multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the still largely neglected research context of bottom of the pyramid (BoP) markets. Consisting of consumers living below the poverty line, BoP markets exhibit significantly different characteristics compared to the affluent developed or the aspirational emerging markets. Dealing with a wide range of diversity within a market where it is difficult to obtain reliable, generalisable information means that MNEs tend to face challenges upon entering them. Yet, the potential demand offered by BoP markets cannot be ignored and MNE’s have shown increasingly that they are willing to innovate market-specific approaches to cater to BoP needs. We discuss the applicability of service-dominant (S-D) logic in subsistence context and identify commitment to the market, strategic CSR, and service quality as key firm-level determinants of effective service marketing in BoP markets. We further identify social trust, technological outreach and performance orientation characteristics in target BoP market as key country-level determinants. Finally, the book chapter offers a number of academic and managerial implications.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed