This article provides responses from academic neurologist Navid Seraji-Bozorgzad to questions posed by Don Ambrose. After moving from Iran to the United States in 1984, Navid Seraji-Bozorgzad attended The Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan for high school. He studied physics as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. After…

Racial bias in research impacts a study's relevancy, validity and reliability, though presently this aspect is not addressed in critical appraisal tools, and consequently appraisers may not take racial bias into account when assessing a paper's quality. Drawing on critical race theory (CRT) tenets that racism is ubiquitous and race a social…

According to national labor market information study, access to talent is the greatest business challenge Canadian biotech companies are facing. We, therefore, developed, implemented, and assessed a pharma industry-inspired, medicinal research laboratory module in an experiential capstone biotechnology laboratory course. This involves developing a…

Efavirenz (EFV) is a well-known, effective anti-retroviral drug long used in first-line treatment for children and adults with HIV and HIV/AIDS. Due to its narrow window of effective concentrations, between 1 and 4 µg/mL, and neurological side effects at supratherapeutic levels, several investigations into the pharmacokinetics of the drug and its…

In this essay, I suggest that a slightly modified version of Freedman's formulation of the clinical equipoise requirement is justified. I begin this essay with a brief discussion of the equipoise requirement. In the second and third sections, I discuss several objections to the clinical equipoise requirement as well as two attempts to justify the…

A network meta-analysis allows a simultaneous comparison between treatments evaluated in randomised controlled trials that share at least one treatment with at least one other study. Estimates of treatment effects may be required for treatments across disconnected networks of evidence, which requires a different statistical approach and modelling…

Monitoring of clinical trials is important to ensure adherence to protocol, to safeguard the rights of research participants and to achieve compliance with principles of good clinical practice. Recent regulatory changes in India require Ethics Committees to keep an oversight of ongoing clinical trials including on-site monitoring. In this article,…

Launching biomedical innovations based on clinical demands instead of translating basic research findings to practice reduces the risk that the results will not fit the clinical routine. To realize this type of innovation, a meta-analysis of the body of research is necessary to reveal demand-matching concepts. However, both the data deluge and the…

Systematic reviewers conducting pairwise meta-analyses sometimes encounter multi-arm studies. To include these studies, and to avoid a unit-of-analysis error, often two or more arms are combined or the control arm is split. In this tutorial, we present 5 different approaches that can be used. Particularly, we present a novel approach (method 4)…

The laboratory practice "Primary culture and directional differentiation of rat bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs)" is part of a required course for sophomore medical students at Tongji university, which has been conducted since 2012. Blended learning has been widely applied in medical courses. Based on a student-centered…

Audre Lorde's provocative admonishment, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," is a fitting caution for Black and other scholars of color who seek to use traditional social and behavioral sciences research as a tool to achieve social justice and health equity in Black communities. Invoking Lorde, I use the…

In studies with time-to-event data, outcomes may be reported as hazard ratios (HR) or binomial counts/proportions at a specific time point. If the intent is to synthesise evidence by performing a meta-analysis or network meta-analysis (NMA) using the HR as the measure of treatment effect, studies that only report binomial data cannot be included…

When we speak about heterogeneity in a meta-analysis, our intent is usually to understand the substantive implications of the heterogeneity. If an intervention yields a mean effect size of 50 points, we want to know if the effect size in different populations varies from 40 to 60, or from 10 to 90, because this speaks to the potential utility of…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, laboratory research was not possible in different educational programs at Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Medical Center due to the taken measures. Therefore, a team of faculty from both institutions developed an alternative transdisciplinary research group project that was fully performed…

Clinical trials in medicine often derive their financial support from the manufacturer of a device or pharmaceutical, but one must view with caution trial designs that allow an interested sponsor to terminate data collection.