BACKGROUND Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is characterized by a chronic relapsing inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract. Adult IBD patients suffer from a disabling disease which greatly affects health-related quality of life (HRQoL). A worse HRQoL in these patients may result in a defensive and ineffective use of medical attention and thus higher medical costs. Because of its chronic nat...

BACKGROUND The high cost of pharmaceuticals, especially biologics, has become an important issue in the battle to control healthcare costs. The Hatch-Waxman Act encourages generic competition but still provides incentives for pioneers to develop new drugs. The Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act is intended to do the same for biologics and biosimilars. OBJECTIVE To examine informat...

Screening for biologics, in particular antibody drugs, has evolved significantly over the last 20 years. Initially, the screening processes and technologies from many years experience with small molecules were adopted and modified to suit the needs of biologics discovery. Since then, antibody drug discovery has matured significantly and is today investing earlier in new technologies that commer...

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is associated with increased cardiovascular risk. Treatment with tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-inhibitors leads to about a 50% reduction in the first cardiovascular event. TNF-inhibitors could transiently improve flow-mediated vasodilation and improve carotid intima-media thickness (ccIMT) during the treatment of RA. Treatment with TNF-inhibitors is associated with an in...

Evidence was obtained that both the WA and BLA crossidiotype (XId) groups are conformational antigens requiring both L and H chains and that with heat denaturation the antigens that define the XIds and antigen-binding activity are lost in parallel. In contrast, the primary structure-dependent crossreactive idiotype (CRI), PSL2, which is only weakly detected on native Wa and Bla monoclonal rheum...

In this paper we investigate the problem of admissibility of a candidate under incomplete distributed knowledge. We formalize this admissibility in terms of the goals that will be achieved by selecting this candidate. The knowledge about what feature can lead to achieve what goal, and the importance of each goal are stored in a structure called BLA (Bipolar Leveled set of Arguments). Once the B...