Integrating treatment cost reduction strategies and biomarker research to reduce costs and personalize expensive treatments: an example of a self-funding trial in non-small cell lung cancer

Personalization of treatment offers the opportunity to treat patients more effectively based on their dominant disease-specific features. The increasing number and types of treatment, and the high costs associated with these treatments, however, demand new approaches that improve patient selection while reducing treatment-associated costs to ensure sustainable healthcare. The DEDICATION-1 trial has been designed to investigate the non-inferiority of lower dosing regimens when compared to standard of care dosing regimens as a potential effective treatment cost reduction strategy to reduce costs of treatment with expensive immune checkpoint inhibitors in non-small cell lung cancer. If non-inferiority is confirmed, lower dosing regimens could be implemented for all therapeutic indications of pembrolizumab. The cost savings obtained within the trial are partly reinvested in biomarker research to improve the personalization of pembrolizumab treatment. The implementation of these biomarkers will potentially lead to additional cost savings by preventing ineffective pembrolizumab exposure, thereby further reducing the financial pressure on healthcare systems. The concepts discussed within this perspective can be applied both to other anticancer agents, as well as to treatments prescribed outside the oncology field

Veilige en efficiënte inspectie van het spoor

Met het project ‘Veilige en efficiënte inspectie van het spoor’ wonnen de bedrijven Inspectation1 en en CQM2 de Hendrik Lorentz Prijs3 . In dit project wordt onder meer deep-learningtechniek intelligent ingezet in combinatie met visualisatietechnieken waardoor spoorweginspecteurs veel sneller en effectiever gebreken in het spoor kunnen identificeren en controleren

Veilige en efficiënte inspectie van het spoor

Met het project ‘Veilige en efficiënte inspectie van het spoor’ wonnen de bedrijven Inspectation1 en en CQM2 de Hendrik Lorentz Prijs3 . In dit project wordt onder meer deep-learningtechniek intelligent ingezet in combinatie met visualisatietechnieken waardoor spoorweginspecteurs veel sneller en effectiever gebreken in het spoor kunnen identificeren en controleren

Refocusing writing style education? Relationships between stylistic lapses and the quality of Dutch secondary school students’ argumentative texts

In Dutch L1 classrooms, style in non-fictional genres is typically taught by means of normative exercises in which students are tasked to identify stylistic lapses. Not much is known about the effectiveness of such exercises when teaching style. Unknown factors include what kinds of stylistic shortcomings are found in Dutch students’ writing, and how the occurrence of certain stylistic lapses relates to writing quality. The current study empirically explores these scarcely investigated issues. Teachers rated 125 argumentative texts written by tenth-grade pre-university students by means of comparative judgement. Additionally, these texts were manually analyzed to investigate the occurrence of stylistic lapses, taking into account stylistic lapses that are common in text books (‘standard category’) and other types of style related errors (‘other category’). Multilevel regression analyses revealed that only one of the stylistic lapses from the standard category negatively influenced text quality as evaluated by teachers, namely the use of detached phrases. In the other category, only mistakes in question marks negatively predicted text quality. A final model including those two predictors explained 11.1% of the variance in text quality. The article discusses the implications of these findings for non-fictional style education, suggesting that it might need to be refocused

Refocusing writing style education? Relationships between stylistic lapses and the quality of Dutch secondary school students’ argumentative texts

In Dutch L1 classrooms, style in non-fictional genres is typically taught by means of normative exercises in which students are tasked to identify stylistic lapses. Not much is known about the effectiveness of such exercises when teaching style. Unknown factors include what kinds of stylistic shortcomings are found in Dutch students’ writing, and how the occurrence of certain stylistic lapses relates to writing quality. The current study empirically explores these scarcely investigated issues. Teachers rated 125 argumentative texts written by tenth-grade pre-university students by means of comparative judgement. Additionally, these texts were manually analyzed to investigate the occurrence of stylistic lapses, taking into account stylistic lapses that are common in text books (‘standard category’) and other types of style related errors (‘other category’). Multilevel regression analyses revealed that only one of the stylistic lapses from the standard category negatively influenced text quality as evaluated by teachers, namely the use of detached phrases. In the other category, only mistakes in question marks negatively predicted text quality. A final model including those two predictors explained 11.1% of the variance in text quality. The article discusses the implications of these findings for non-fictional style education, suggesting that it might need to be refocused

Refocusing writing style education? Relationships between stylistic lapses and the quality of Dutch secondary school students’ argumentative texts

In Dutch L1 classrooms, style in non-fictional genres is typically taught by means of normative exercises in which students are tasked to identify stylistic lapses. Not much is known about the effectiveness of such exercises when teaching style. Unknown factors include what kinds of stylistic shortcomings are found in Dutch students’ writing, and how the occurrence of certain stylistic lapses relates to writing quality. The current study empirically explores these scarcely investigated issues. Teachers rated 125 argumentative texts written by tenth-grade pre-university students by means of comparative judgement. Additionally, these texts were manually analyzed to investigate the occurrence of stylistic lapses, taking into account stylistic lapses that are common in text books (‘standard category’) and other types of style related errors (‘other category’). Multilevel regression analyses revealed that only one of the stylistic lapses from the standard category negatively influenced text quality as evaluated by teachers, namely the use of detached phrases. In the other category, only mistakes in question marks negatively predicted text quality. A final model including those two predictors explained 11.1% of the variance in text quality. The article discusses the implications of these findings for non-fictional style education, suggesting that it might need to be refocused

A serum and platelet-rich plasma serotonin assay using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry for monitoring of neuroendocrine tumor patients

Background Serotonin is used for the diagnosis and follow-up of neuroendocrine tumors (NET). We describe the analytical and clinical validation of a liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) based serotonin assay for serum and platelet-rich plasma (PRP). Methods An LC-MS/MS based method for serum and PRP serotonin was validated by determination of assay imprecision, carry-over, linearity, interference, recovery, sample stability and a matrix/method comparison of serum and PRP serotonin was made with whole blood serotonin. Furthermore, upper limits of normal were determined and serotonin concentrations of healthy individuals, 14 NET patients without evidence of disease and 51 NET patients with evidence of disease were compared. Results For serum and PRP fractions, total assay imprecision was <5%. All correlation coefficients were 0.98 and the serum and platelet-rich serotonin upper limit of normal were 5.5nmol/109 platelet and 5.1nmol/109 platelet, respectively. NET patients with confirmed evidence of disease had significantly higher serum and PRP serotonin levels when compared to NET patients without evidence of disease and healthy volunteers. Conclusions LC-MS/MS based serum and PRP serotonin assays were developed with suitable analytical characteristics. Furthermore, serum and PRP serotonin was found to be useful for monitoring NET patients