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Toolkit is easily incorporated into any laboratory science course Wilmington, Del., April 1, 2021 – St. Georges Technical High School in southern New Castle County, Delaware is the first high school in the United States to use ChristianaCare Gene Editing Institute’s innovative CRISPR in a Box Educational Toolkit™ in a science class. CRISPR in a Box brings to life the much-heralded CRISPR gene editing technology – the “genetic scissors” that allow scientists to edit DNA. The toolkit is designed for educational sessions in secondary and post-secondary schools and is suitable for remote learning. “Gene editing is the future of medicine,” said Eric Kmiec, Ph.D., director of ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute. “Our partnership with the Delaware Department of Education will help cultivate the next generation of genetic scientists and enhance Delaware’s position as a leader in the biosciences.” “We are thrilled that students at St. Georges Technical High School will be the first In the United States to experience a live demonstration of CRISPR gene editing using our Innovative CRISPR in a Box educational toolkit,” said Siobhan Hawthorne, Education and Community Outreach leader at ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute. “This toolkit will provide STEM students with a visual understanding of how the exciting CRISPR technology can unlock medical treatments to improve lives.” Delaware Secretary of Education Susan Bunting praised her department's partnership with ChristianaCare's Gene Editing Institute to develop the “Seeds of STEM” course that teaches high school students about gene editing. “Gene editing approaches diseases in new ways and will have significant impact in the health care and agriscience fields,” Bunting said. “This is a great example of an industry and education partnership investing in youth by providing hands-on knowledge and skills around emerging technology.” “We are so fortunate that ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute reached out to our program to plan a high school ‘first’ opportunity with this new CRISPR experiment,” said Danya Espadas, one of the St. Georges biotech teachers. “Giving students the chance to use a cutting-edge, 21st century tool for medicine in their own high school lab – to have that technology at their fingertips – transcends what they see in a textbook or a video. By being able to do it themselves, it makes it real for them.” Espada said the experiment focuses on editing a gene of a non-infectious E.coli bacteria to become resistant to an antibiotic, thereby allowing researchers to create a new class of antibiotics that cannot be overcome by bacteria that are gene resistant. “We’re talking about eventually saving lives, here,” she said. “What can be more important than that?” The tools in CRISPR in a Box have been designed based on the pioneering discoveries of the Gene Editing Institute that are currently being used to explore next-generation medical therapies and diagnostics for diseases, including lung cancer and sickle-cell anemia. Component items in the toolkit include the CRISPR/Cas complex, a target DNA molecule, a mammalian cell free extract and a synthetic DNA molecule. All materials in the kit are safe, synthetic materials. There are no live cultures or viruses involved. The kit is meant to provide a hands-on demonstration of CRISPR’s capabilities, and not allow for manipulations of living organisms. “The kit is easy and fun to use,” said Kristen Pisarcik, research assistant at the Gene Editing Institute who has taught students at Delaware Technical Community College which first used the toolkit. “In a short period of time students will reliably and successfully complete the laboratory activity and be able to see the results of gene editing,” she said. Since the foundations of the kit touch upon key themes in biology, it can be readily incorporated into practically any science or biology course with a laboratory component, “One of the beauties of CRISPR in a Box is that there is no need to purchase specialized equipment. If a teaching lab can support bacterial cultivation, it can perform the in vitro gene editing lab activity,” Pisarcik said. CRISPR in a Box is the evolution of a partnership between the Gene Editing Institute, Delaware Technical Community College and Rockland Immunochemicals that began in 2017 with a National Science Foundation grant to develop the first-ever gene editing curriculum for community college students. Video and photo collection of first class in U.S. to use CRISPR in a Box™ educational gene editing toolkit. About ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute The Gene Editing Institute, a worldwide leader in CRISPR gene editing technology and the only institute of its kind based within a community health care system, takes a patient-first approach in all its research to improve the lives of people with life-threatening disease. Since 2015, researchers at the Gene Editing Institute have been involved in several ground-breaking firsts in the field, including the development of the first CRISPR gene editing tool to allow DNA repairs outside the human cell which will rapidly speed therapies to patients and a unique version of CRISPR called EXACT that reduces the number of off-target edits to other areas of the genome, which is vital for further research and patient applications. Its researchers are currently developing a patient trial for lung cancer using CRISPR and employing the technology to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. About the biotech program St. Georges Technical High School The Biotech career program of study at St. Georges Technical High School is the first such program offered in a Delaware high school. With two teachers and approximately 100 students in grades 10-12, the program presents advanced content in biology and chemistry with opportunities for students to learn basic laboratory techniques and procedures and to maintain and operate common instruments and equipment used in a biotechnology laboratory. St. Georges is a comprehensive career and technical high school with 1,100 students who study in one of 16 different career pathways.
This year marks 100 years since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which eventually would establish Ireland as a republic, and Georgia Southern University undergraduate student Caitlyn Hudson is getting a first-hand look at some historical documents that chronicle U.S. efforts to help establish Ireland’s freedom from British rule. Hudson is researching a collection of documents called the Lawless papers, which follow Virginia-native and Irish descendant Joseph Thomas Lawless’ involvement in the southern leg of an extensive U.S. tour by Éamon de Valera, a prominent political leader in Ireland’s history. “My favorite part of working on the project has to be the physical work with the documents,” Hudson said. “It is fascinating to see primary documents in hand rather than online. It provides a unique form of analysis.” The collection, which was gifted in Fall 2020 to the Center for Irish Research and Teaching (CIRT) at Georgia Southern, includes letters, advertisements and more that document an important narrative in modern Irish-American history, according to Howard Keeley, Ph.D., director of CIRT. “These documents shed significant new light on how Ireland perceived Savannah and our region at a critical time in Irish history: that nation’s War of Independence from 1919 to 1921,” Keeley said. “The collection helps us understand the network that Éamonn de Valera and other future leaders of an independent Ireland sought to build in the American South, using as one anchor the sizable and active Irish-American community in Savannah.” All of the Lawless papers were either written or received by Lawless, the son of immigrants from County Galway, Ireland. Lawless was involved in arranging southern stops on de Valera’s tour, which included a stop at the Chatham Artillery Armory in April 1920, in an effort to raise funds for the self-proclaimed Republic of Ireland. Lawless, who would go on to become a lawyer and prominent political figure in Virginia, was also very devoted to Ireland and involved in several prominent Irish-American organizations, including the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF), which advocated for political independence for Ireland. “De Valera’s fundraising tour of the U.S. is among the most important episodes in modern Irish-American history,” said Keeley. “The collection sheds significant light on how FOIF used the tour to advance a southern strategy. Clearly, Judge Lawless was key to those efforts.” Keeley also pointed out that in time, de Valera would become prime minister, and then president, of an independent Ireland, dominating the country’s politics for decades. The collection was gifted to CIRT by direct descendants of Lawless and is now housed in the special collections section of the Zach S. Henderson Library. “We are honored to be granted stewardship of these documents,” said Autumn Johnson, special collections librarian at Zach S. Henderson Library. “Having increased opportunities for Georgia Southern students to examine rare, one-of-a-kind collections, such as the Lawless papers, enriches the learning experience, particularly for our undergraduates.” Hudson said her work on the project has allowed her to fully understand the various aspects of potential careers she can pursue, as well as narrow down specific goals for her graduate school journey and beyond. “This type of work is generally done by graduate students, and it is amazing to know that I am able to gain experience in a field while an undergraduate,” said Hudson. “It has allowed me to learn career-relevant material earlier on and in turn has allowed me to better prepare for graduate school and my overall future goals.” Keeley added a collection like the Lawless papers allows students and faculty to conduct research on high-value primary source documents. The collection will also help further CIRT’s ongoing mission to increase research productivity, particularly with respect to the history of the Irish in Savannah and the state of Georgia. “The Irish experience in the south is open to much more study than has thus far been attempted,” Keeley said. “The generous gift of the Lawless papers to the Center for Irish Research and Teaching significantly enhances our drive to conduct meaningful research. For undergraduate students, such as Caitlyn, the opportunity to uncover knowledge by analyzing primary-source documents brings new levels of rigor and satisfaction to the college experience. And for our program, this collaboration with the Special Collections unit of University Libraries is a powerful way to honor our donors’ trust in us and, in addition, celebrate Irish heritage, especially around St. Patrick’s Day.” If you're a journalist looking to learn more about his project of the historical significance the Irish had on Georgia - then let us help. Dr. Howard Keeley is available for interviews — simply reach out to Georgia Southern Director of Communications Jennifer Wise at jwise@georgiasouthern.edu to set and time and date.
Childhood psychology expert on migrant children at U.S.-Mexico border
Kathryn Humphreys, assistant professor, department of psychology and human development, is available for commentary on the influx of migrant children at the border and group-based housing for these children. Kathryn received her doctoral degree in clinical psychology and has expertise in infant and early childhood mental health. Her research focuses on characterizing the early environment and examining links to later life outcomes. Some of her recent research finds that stressful or traumatic experiences occurring in a child’s earliest years—birth to age 5—have been linked to reduced hippocampal volume in adolescence, which is connected to learning, memory and mood.
Product Returns Represent Billion-Dollar Strategic Blind Spot for Major Retailers
“Product returns have never, to our knowledge, been explicitly included as a stage in a major customer journey model,” the authors note in their paper. “This exclusion represents a strategic blind-spot for marketers.” In December 2020, Linne Fulcher, vice president, customer strategy, science and journeys at Walmart U.S., published a blog post that outlined Walmart’s new return policy. Dubbed “Carrier Pickup by FedEx,” the service was just in time for the holidays, free, and “here to stay,” Fulcher wrote. She described the policy as “an incredibly convenient way to make that unwanted gift ‘magically’ disappear,” whether customers bought items in a store, online, or from a third party vendor. “We want the returns experience to be easy, safe and seamless,” she added. Returns are big business. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), U.S. consumers returned an estimated $428 billion worth of merchandise last year—approximately 10.6 percent of total U.S. retail sales. The numbers for ecommerce are even more startling: online shopping accounted for roughly $565 billion of 2020 retail sales, of which $102 billion in merchandise—about 18 percent—was returned. However, retail advisory firm Optoro noted in 2019 that of 117 top retailers, not even a third of them quantify the full cost of returns. Even before the pandemic hit, Sandy Jap, Sarah Beth Brown professor in marketing, Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing, and former Goizueta Business School dean, Tom Robertson, were perplexed at how little academic research existed regarding returns. “Instead of viewing returns as a nuisance and an added cost, they are an opportunity to engage with customers and build brand loyalty,” explains Robertson. “Returns are part and parcel of the new retail landscape. This has been exacerbated by the strong uptick in online.” To help retailers identify opportunities, Jap, Hamilton, and Robertson wrote “Many (Un)happy Returns? The Changing Nature of Retail Product Returns and Future Research Directions,” published in Journal of Retailing last year. The article is essentially a researcher’s road map for exploring this “strategically important area,” says Jap. Some retailers, such as Warby Parker and Stitch Fix, have built returns into their business models. Others, like Zappos and Nordstrom, have made consumer-generated returns easy, assuming that doing so engenders brand loyalty and repeat business. Yet most retailers seem “to lack a coherent philosophy” on returns and “appear not to have built return rates into their business models at all,” the trio state in their paper. “There are so many interesting and important questions to be answered around product returns,” says Hamilton. “Important as returns are, the academic marketing research has barely scratched the surface.” “Many (Un)happy Returns” highlights five specific areas where advancements in theory and practice would provide opportunity for greater understanding: 1. How product returns transform the customer journey 2. The “dark side” of returns—exploring the gray area between justified returns and outright fraud 3. The effects of returns on traditional retailer supply chains 4. Customer response to easy product returns and practices 5. The effect of retailers’ product return practices on their reputation “These questions represent a range of important directions for assembling a body of work on retailer-initiated and customer-initiated return behaviors and processes,” they write. “Ultimately, these might serve to improve the performance of return forecasting models, illuminate optimal go-to-market strategies and distribution processes in the evolving, technology-oriented marketplace that characterizes retailing today.” Each of the five points above are detailed in a piece recently published by Emory University. That article is attached here: If you are a journalist looking to cover this topic or if you are simply interested in learning more, then let us help. Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. Sandy Jap holds the Sarah Beth Brown Endowed Professorship of Marketing Chair at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. Both are available to speak with media, simply click on eithr expert's icon now – to book an interview today.
Learning online honestly. Is cheating becoming part of the ‘new normal’ in education?
The emergence of COVID-19 has seen almost every segment of society and traditional institution in America have to pivot drastically to sustain and carry on, especially the educational system. And as students across America had to log on and learn remotely in the last year, occurrences of cheating are trending upwards. It’s a phenomenon that is getting a lot of attention and University of Mary Washington Psychology Professor David Rettinger, an expert on academic integrity, is getting a lot of calls from media about it. Roughly a year after college campuses were evacuated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, academic integrity remains an issue for students and professors alike. With professors struggling to curb rampant cheating during online exams and students wrestling with the often confusing and stressful realities of online learning, the college classroom has never been more tense… Teen Vogue has spoken with academics and students to learn more about what kind of cheating is happening during remote learning, and what they think should be done about it. University battles with help sites have peaked during the COVID-19 crisis, but the root of the problem has been years in the making. “I call it a game of whack-a-mole,” says David Rettinger, president emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) and director of academic integrity at the University of Mary Washington. New sites are constantly rising in popularity, he explains, making it harder for professors to prevent students from seeking answers online, especially now. March 04 – Teen Vogue And how even the most respected of institutions like West Point are handling these cases have also seen Rettinger’s expert perspective sought out to explain. “Expulsion flies in the face of everything we understand about the psychology of ethical and moral behavior,” Rettinger said. That’s partly because the section of the brain that makes you feel “icky” when you do something wrong isn’t fully developed until around age 23 to 26 — after college is over. Rettinger said rehabilitation seems in line with West Point’s mission — to instill the values of duty, honor and country. “That doesn't necessarily mean weeding people out who are imperfect, because we're all imperfect,” Rettinger said. “That means taking the best cadets we can and turning them into the best officers they can be, which means teaching them. And if there's no opportunity for redemption, what are we really teaching?” March 08 – NPR The concept of cheating and how schools are handling it is an emerging issue in America. And if you are a journalist looking to cover this subject, then let us help with your stories. Dr. David Rettinger is available to speak with media regarding this issue of cheating and academic integrity. Simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.
New research examining the economic impact of micromobility on local economies found shared e-scooter systems created an estimated $13.8 million in additional sales across 370 food and beverage companies in four cities over six months in 2019, as compared to four similar cities over the same time period without e-scooter programs. The study compared consumer purchase patterns in four cities that allowed operation of shared e-scooter systems – Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. – to similar cities that did not at the time – Boston, Houston, Phoenix, and Seattle. The study used extensive econometric methods to uncover purchasing that was caused by e-scooter rides, which would not have occurred otherwise. “The post-COVID economic recovery remains slow, but this research shows we shouldn’t ignore the positive impact of micromobility on small businesses,” said Dan McCarthy, senior author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “This is especially relevant for the food and beverage sector, a significant source of jobs, which is suffering sales declines larger than most other sectors of the economy.” The study uncovered e-scooter usage generated significant positive economic spillovers for the food and beverage industry purchasing in a similar way that consumers make impulse purchases at grocery stores – its effects are larger for businesses where the consumption happens more quickly, and businesses selling at lower prices. Across the cities studied with e-scooter programs, total sales in the food and beverage category increased by an estimated 0.6 percent on average, or approximately $921 in incremental spending per available e-scooter for the food and beverage companies over the six-month period studied in the analysis. “Since these companies represent approximately 15 percent of the overall food and beverage market in these cities, the actual impact could be much larger,” said McCarthy. “If, for instance, subsequent research confirmed a similar level of uptick across all food and beverage companies in these markets driven by micromobility, the overall full-year economic impact could be close to $200 million.” If you're interested in learning more - there's a full article published by Emory Business attached. And, if you're a journalist looking to cover this exciting and emerging topic - then let us help. Dan McCarthy is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Emory University's Goizueta School of Business. His research specialty is the application of leading-edge statistical methodology to contemporary empirical marketing problems. Dan is available to speak with media - simply click on his icon now to arrange an intwrview today.
Why online recommendations make it easier to hit “buy”
When it is time to buy something online, perhaps a coffee maker, you might head to Amazon and browse items for sale. One particular model might spark interest. The product page may contain recommendations for other goods: complementary products such as coffee filters; or recommendations for different, competitor coffee maker brands offering unique features and prices. E-commerce websites commonly use product recommendations — called co-purchase and co-view recommendations — to keep users locked into the sales funnel and increase customer retention. But what impact do these types of recommendations actually have on consumers? How do they influence one’s willingness to pay for the original product searched? In fact, the level of influence depends on how close a consumer is to making that purchase, says Jesse Bockstedt, associate professor of information systems & operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. In addition, what type of recommendation the consumer sees plays a role in purchasing as well. To shed empirical light on this, Bockstedt teamed with Mingyue Zhang from the Shanghai International Studies University. “We were curious. We knew that recommendation systems are integral to how consumers discover products online – a good 35 percent of Amazon sales can be attributed to recommendations, for instance,” Bockstedt says. “But we knew a lot less about how recommendations change consumer behavior in relation to a focal product.” Specifically, the researchers were interested in looking at the effect of complementary versus substitutable products, and what impact the price of these types of products had on consumer behavior. They also wanted to know whether these effects were more or less amplified depending on whether consumers were at the exploratory phase in the buying process or ready to go ahead and make the purchase. To unpack the dynamics at play, Bockstedt and Zhang ran two experiments that simulated the online purchasing experience. The researchers had volunteers go through the process of evaluating different products and then report back on how much they were willing to pay for each. “We asked volunteers to look at a product page for a computer mouse, and we randomly assigned different recommendations to that page – some that were for other mice, and others that were for goods and products that would complement the original mouse. Going through the experiment, we also manipulated the price that volunteers saw on different pages, both for the recommended substitute and complementary products,” he says. “Finally, we looked at the effect of timing and the sales funnel. In one case we had volunteers look for a highly specific mouse and recommended a particular product page to them. To simulate the more exploratory phase, we gave them many pages and asked them to click on the one they found most interesting.” In total, Bockstedt and Zhang put 200+ volunteers through the replica virtual purchasing experience and recorded their willingness to pay the advertised price for the focal product on scale of 0 to 100, depending on what they had seen and the point in the sales funnel they had seen the recommendations. If you are looking to learn more about this research and the results, Emory has a full article published for reading and review. If you are a journalist looking to cover this topic or if you are simply interested in learning more, then let us help. Jesse Bockstedt, associate professor of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. He is available to speak with media, simply click on his icon now – to book an interview today.
Online ratings systems shouldn’t just be a numbers game
When you’re browsing the internet for something to buy, watch, listen, or rent, chances are that you will scan online recommendations before you make your purchase. It makes sense. With an overabundance of options in front of you, it can be difficult to know exactly which movie or garment or holiday gift is the best fit. Personalized recommendation systems help users navigate the often-confusing labyrinth of online content. They take a lot of the legwork out of decision-making. And they are an increasingly commonplace function of our online behavior. All of which is in your best interest as a consumer, right? Yes and no, says Jesse Bockstedt, associate professor of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. Bockstedt has produced a body of research in recent years that reveals a number of issues with recommendation systems that should be on the radar of organizations and users alike. While user ratings, often shown as stars on a five- or ten-point scale, can help you decide whether or not to go ahead and make a selection, online recommendations can also create a bias towards a product or experience that might have little or nothing to do with your actual preferences, Bockstedt says. Simply put, you’re more likely to watch, listen to, or buy something because it’s been recommended. And, when it comes to recommending the thing you’ve just watched, listened to, or bought yourself, your own rating might also be heavily influenced by the way it was recommended to you in the first place. “Our research has shown that when a consumer is presented with a product recommendation that has a predicted preference rating—for example, we think you’ll like this movie or it has four and a half out of five stars—this information creates a bias in their preferences,” Bockstedt says. “The user will report liking the item more after they consume it if the system’s initial recommendation was high, and they say they like it less post-consumption, if the system’s recommendation was low. This holds even if the system recommendations are completely made up and random. So the information presented to the user in the recommendation creates a bias in how they perceive the item even after they’ve actually consumed or used it.” This in turn creates a feedback loop which can reflect authentic preference, but this preference is very likely to be contaminated by bias. And that’s a problem, Bockstedt says. “Once you have error baked into your recommendation system via this biased feedback loop, it’s going to reproduce and reproduce so that as an organization you’re pushing your customers towards certain types of products or content and not others—albeit unintentionally,” Bockstedt explains. “And for users or consumers, it’s also problematic in the sense that you’re taking the recommendations at face value, trusting them to be accurate while in fact they may not be. So there’s a trust issue right there.” Online recommendation systems can also potentially open the door to less than scrupulous behaviors, Bockstedt adds. Because ratings can anchor user preferences and choices to one product over another, who’s to say organizations might not actually leverage the effect to promote more expensive options to their users? In other words, systems have the potential to be manipulated such that customers pay more—and pay more for something that they may not in fact have chosen in the first place. Addressing recommendation system-induced bias is imperative, Bockstedt says, because these systems are essentially here to stay. So how do you go about attenuating the effect? His latest paper sheds new and critical light on this. Together with Gediminas Adomavicius and Shawn P. Curley of the University of Minnesota and Indiana University’s Jingjing Zhang, Bockstedt ran a series of lab experiments to determine whether user bias could be eliminated or mitigated by showing users different types of recommendations or rating systems. Specifically they wanted to see if different formats or interface displays could diminish the bias effect on users. And what they found is highly significant. Emory has published a full article on this topic – and its available for reading here: If you are a journalist looking to cover this topic or if you are simply interested in learning more, then let us help. Jesse Bockstedt, associate professor of information systems and operations management at Emory’s Goizueta Business School. He is available to speak with media, simply click on his icon now – to book an interview today.
Survival analysis: Forecasting lifespans of patients and products
How long will you live? Should you spring for that AppleCare+ warranty for your iPhone? When will your buddy pay you back for that lunch? For centuries, soothsayers have striven to understand the lifespan of things – be they patient longevity, product lifecycles, or even time to loan default. Nowadays, scientists have turned away from reading tea leaves and toward survival analysis – a complex data science method for predicting not only whether an event will happen (the death of a patient, the failure of a product or machine, default on a payment, and so on) but when this event is likely to occur. But it’s problematic. Until now, the tools of survival analysis have only been applicable in certain settings. This is due to the inherent heterogeneity of what is being analyzed: differences in patient lifestyles, demographics, product usage patterns, and so on. New research by Goizueta Business School’s Donald Lee, associate professor of information systems and operations management and of biostatistics and bioinformatics, has yielded a new tool that greatly extends survival analysis to broader use cases. “Historically, scientists have used classic survival analysis tools to predict the lifespan of different things in different fields, from products to patients,” Lee said. “Since the 1950s, the Kaplan-Meier estimator has been the benchmark for analyzing lifetime data, particularly in clinical trials. The next breakthrough came in the 1970s when the Cox proportional hazards model was introduced, which allows researchers to incorporate variables that can affect the predictability of things like patient mortality.” The problem with the existing survival analysis tools, Lee said, is that they make certain assumptions that can skew the predictions if the assumptions are not met. “There are very few existing tools that can incorporate variables without imposing assumptions on how they affect survival, let alone when there are a lot of variables that can also change over time. For example, two iPhones will have different lifespans depending on the temperature at which they are stored, amongst many other factors. But it’s unlikely that storing your phone at 30 degrees will halve its lifespan compared to storing it at 60 degrees. This sort of linear relationship is commonly assumed by existing tools.” Lee’s team developed a new survival methodology based on something called gradient boosting: a machine learning technique that combines decision trees to yield predictions. The method, Lee said, is totally assumption-free (or nonparametric in technical parlance) and can deal with a large number of variables that can change continuously over time, making it significantly more general than existing methods. Nothing like it has been seen until now, he noted. “Calculating the survival rate of anything is super complex because of the variables. Say you want to create an app for a smart watch that monitors the wearer’s vitals and use this information to create a real-time warning indicator for stroke. Doing this accurately is difficult for two reasons,” Lee explained. “First, a large number of variables may be relevant to stroke risk, and the variables can interact in ways that break the assumptions central to existing survival analysis methods. And second, variables like blood pressure vary over time, and it is the recent measurements that are most informative. This introduces an additional time dimension that further complicates things.” The software implementation of Lee’s method, BoXHED, overcomes both issues and allows scientists to develop real-time predictive models for conditions like stroke. The trained model can then be ported to a watch app to tell its wearer if and when they’re likely to have a stroke, a process known as inferencing in machine learning lingo. The implications, Lee said, are huge. “BoXHED now opens the door for modern applications of survival analysis. In previous research, I have looked at the design of early warning mortality indicators for patients with advanced cancer and also for patients in the ICU. These use other methods to make predictions at fixed points in time, but now they can be transformed into real-time warning indicators using BoXHED.” He cited the case of end-stage cancer patients who are often better served by hospice care than by aggressive therapy. “Accurate predictions of survival are absolutely critical for care planning. In previous analyses, we have seen that using existing predictive models to inform end-of-life care planning can potentially avert $1.9 million in medical costs and 1,600 days of unnecessary inpatient care per 1,000 patient visits in the United States. BoXHED is likely to lead to even better results.” Lee’s research paper is forthcoming in the Annals of Statistics. He has also created an open-source software implementation of BoXHED, which can radically improve the accuracy of survival analysis across a breadth of applications. The paper describing BoXHED was published in the International Conference on Machine Learning, and the latest version of the BoXHED software can be found online. If you are a journalist or looking to speak with Donald Lee – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview or appointment today.
COVID-9 is changing. With variants from places like Britain, Brazil, and South Africa surfacing and presenting in patients around the globe, the virus that scientists are trying to trap seems to be finding ways to wiggle free. The topic has many in the scientific and health care communities concerned, and recently, the New York Times featured leading experts to help explain what is happening and what American’s need to know to stay safe and healthy. Now, Dr. Denison and Sandra Weller, a virologist at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, are investigating whether this insight could treat people with Covid. Certain antiviral drugs such as remdesivir fight infections by serving as RNA decoys that gum up the viral replication process. But these medications don’t work as well as some had hoped for coronaviruses. One theory is that the nsp14-ExoN enzyme chucks out the errors caused by these drugs, thereby rescuing the virus. Dr. Denison and Dr. Weller, among others, are looking for drugs that would block the activity of nsp14-ExoN, allowing remdesivir and other antivirals to work more effectively. Dr. Weller likens this approach to the cocktail therapies for H.I.V., which combine molecules that act on different aspects of the virus’s replication. “We need combination therapy for coronaviruses,” she said. Dr. Weller notes that nsp14-ExoN is shared across coronaviruses, so a drug that successfully suppresses it could act against more than just SARS-CoV-2. She and Dr. Denison are still at the early stages of drug discovery, testing different molecules in cells. February 05 – New York Times The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is seeing many different twists in turns as scientists are learning more about the virus and how we can contain its spread – and if you are a journalist looking to speak with an expert on the topic, then let us help. Sandra K. Weller is Professor and Chair in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biophysics at the University of Connecticut and is a world-renowned expert in the spread of viruses. Dr. Weller is available to speak with media – simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.
