Cancer drugs in LMICs: cheap but unaffordable

Cancer drugs in LMICs: cheap but unaffordable

Cheap (But Functional) Threads

This article demonstrates how a powerful and expressive abstraction from concurrency theory plays a dual rôle as a programming tool for concurrent applications and as a foundation for their verification. This abstraction—monads of resumptions expressed using monad transformers—is cheap: it is easy to understand, easy to implement, and easy to reason about. We illustrate the expressiveness of th...

Cervical cancer prevention training in South East Asian LMICs

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a confederation of 10 sovereign states occupying approximately 1.7 million square miles of Southeast Asia with an estimated population of just under 630 million. Southeast Asia continues to have one of the world's highest rates of cervical cancer-related death. Organised training in cervical cancer screening is essential but lacking in low t...

Why your preferred targeted drugs may become unaffordable.

Trastuzumab, a monoclonal antibody directed at the HER2 receptor, is one of the most impressive targeted drugs developed in the last two decades. Indeed, when given in conjunction with chemotherapy, it improves the survival of women with HER2 positive breast cancer, both in advanced and in early disease. Its optimal duration, however, is poorly defined in both settings with a significant econom...

Point-of-care test for cervical cancer in LMICs

Cervical cancer screening using Papanicolaou's smear test has been highly effective in reducing death from this disease. However, this test is unaffordable in low- and middle-income countries, and its complexity has limited wide-scale uptake. Alternative tests, such as visual inspection with acetic acid or Lugol's iodine and human papillomavirus DNA, are sub-optimal in terms of specificity and ...