In contrast to peer-assisted learning (PAL) in clinical training, there is scant literature on the efficacy of PAL during basic medical sciences teaching for preclinical students. A group of senior medical students aimed to design and deliver clinically oriented small-group tutorials after every module in the preclinical curriculum at a United Kingdom medical school. Twenty tutorials were deliv...

Generalized Bose-Einstein and Femi-Dirac distributions in the interpolation approximation (IA) has been shown to yield results in agreement with the exact ones within the O(q − 1) and in highand low-temperature limits [H. Hasegawa, arXiv:0904.2399], where q stands for the entropic index. We have applied the generalized distributions in the IA to typical nonextensive quantum subjects: the black-...

The isobole is well established and commonly used in the quantitative study of agonist drug combinations. This article reviews the isobole, its derivation from the concept of dose equivalence, and its usefulness in providing the predicted effect of an agonist drug combination, a topic not discussed in pharmacology textbooks. This review addresses that topic and also shows that an alternate meth...

The high rate of negative clinical trials and failed drug development programs calls into question the use of preclinical testing as currently practiced. An important issue for the in vitro testing of agents that have advanced into the clinic is the use of clinically irrelevant concentrations in reports making claims for anticancer activity, as illustrated by publications for sorafenib, vorinos...

Monoclonal antibodies are the dominant agents used in inhibition of biological target molecules for disease therapeutics, but there are concerns of immunogenicity, production, cost and stability. Oligonucleotide aptamers have comparable affinity and specificity to targets with monoclonal antibodies whilst they have minimal immunogenicity, high production, low cost and high stability, thus are p...

The journal Human Biology was founded 80 years ago by Raymond Pearl, an eminent biologist and professor of biometry and vital statistics at Johns Hopkins University. In celebration of the 80th anniversary of the founding of this journal, I was invited by Franz Manni (Executive Editor) to update a previously published history of Human Biology on the 75th anniversary of its founding (Crawford 200...