Bundled Payment “Creep”: Institutional Redesign for Primary Arthroplasty Positively Affects Revision Arthroplasty

Background

Revision total joint arthroplasty (TJA) is associated with increased readmissions, complications, and expense compared to primary TJA. Bundled payment methods have been used to improve value of care in primary TJA, but little is known of their impact in revision TJA patients. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of a care redesign for a bundled payment model for primary TJA on quality metrics for revision patients, despite absence of a targeted intervention for revisions.

A survey of robotic surgery training curricula in general surgery residency programs: How close are we to a standardized curriculum?

Background

Robotic surgery is increasingly adopted into surgical practice, but it remains unclear what level of robotic training general surgery residents receive. The purpose of our study was to assess the variation in robotic surgery training amongst general surgery residency programs in the United States.

Short-Duration Prednisolone in Children with Nephrotic Syndrome Relapse: A Noninferiority Randomized Controlled Trial

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Binding mode of conformations and structure-based pharmacophore development for farnesyltransferase inhibitors

Farnesyltransferase (FTase) is one of the prenyltransferase family enzymes that catalyse the transfer of 15-membered isoprenoid (farnesyl) moiety to the cysteine of CAAX motif-containing proteins including Rho and Ras family of G proteins. Inhibitors of FTase act as drugs for cancer, malaria, progeria and other diseases. In the present investigation, we have developed two structure-based pharmacophore models from protein–ligand complex (3E33 and 3E37) obtained from the protein data bank. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed on the complexes, and different conformers of the same complex were generated. These conformers were undergone protein–ligand interaction fingerprint (PLIF) analysis, and the fingerprint bits have been used for structure-based pharmacophore model development. The PLIF results showed that Lys164, Tyr166, TrpB106 and TyrB361 are the major interacting residues in both the complexes. The RMSD and RMSF analyses on the MD-simulated systems showed that the absence of FPP in the complex 3E37 has significant effect in the conformational changes of the ligands. During this conformational change, some interactions between the protein and the ligands are lost, but regained after some simulations (after 2 ns). The structure-based pharmacophore models showed that the hydrophobic and acceptor contours are predominantly present in the models. The pharmacophore models were validated using reference compounds, which significantly identified as HITs with smaller RMSD values. The developed structure-based pharmacophore models are significant, and the methodology used in this study is novel from the existing methods (the original X-ray crystallographic coordination of the ligands is used for the model building). In our study, along with the original coordination of the ligand, different conformers of the same complex (protein–ligand) are used. It concluded that the developed methodology is significant for the virtual screening of novel molecules on different targets.