Current status of novel biologics and small molecule drugs in the individualized treatment of inflammatory bowel disease

Treatment strategies for inflammatory bowel disease(IBD)are rapidly evolving with the development of biologics and small molecule drugs(SMDs).However,these drugs are not guaranteed to be effective in all patients,and a“ceiling effect”of biologic monotherapy may occur.This issue highlights an unmet need for optimizing the use of biologics and predicting therapeutic responses.Thus,the development of new drugs with novel mechanisms of action is urgently needed for patients with primary nonresponse and secondary loss of response to conventional biologics and SMDs.In addition,combining different biologics or SMDs has been proposed as a novel strategy to enhance treatment efficacy in IBD,which theoretically has multidimensional anti-inflammatory potential.Based on the current evidence available for IBD,dual targeted therapy may be a promising strategy for refractory IBD patients who have failed in multiple biologic treatments or who have extraintestinal manifestation.Additionally,identifying the subgroup of IBD patients who are responding to biological combination therapies is also equally important in stable disease remission.In this review,we summarize the newly developed biologics and SMDs and the current status of biologics/SMDs to highlight the development of individualized treatment in IBD.

An enhanced framework for providing multimedia broadcast/multicast service over heterogeneous networks

Multimedia broadcast multicast service(MBMS)with inherently low requirement for network resources has been proposed as a candidate solution for using such resources in a more efficient manner.On the other hand,the Next Generation Mobile Network(NGMN)combines multiple radio access technologies(RATs)to optimize overall network performance.Handover performance is becoming a vital indicator of the quality experience of mobile user equipment(UE).In contrast to the conventional vertical handover issue,the problem we are facing is how to seamlessly transmit broadcast/multicast sessions among heterogeneous networks.In this paper,we propose a new network entity,media independent broadcast multicast service center(MIBM-SC),to provide seamless handover for broadcast/multicast sessions over heterogeneous networks,by extensions and enhancements of MBMS and media independent information service(MIIS)architectures.Additionally,a network selection scheme and a cell transmission mode selection scheme are proposed for selecting the best target network and best transmission mode.Both schemes are based on a load-aware network capacity estimation algorithm.Simulation results show that the proposed approach has the capability to provide MBMS over heterogeneous networks,with improved handover performance in terms of packet loss rate,throughput,handover delay,cell load,bandwidth usage,and the peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR).

Seamless handover between unicast and multicast multimedia streams

With the deployment of heterogeneous networks, mobile users are expecting ubiquitous connectivity when using applications. For bandwidth-intensive applications such as Internet Protocol Television(IPTV), multimedia contents are typically transmitted using a multicast delivery method due to its bandwidth efficiency. However, not all networks support multicasting. Multicasting alone could lead to service disruption when the users move from a multicast-capable network to a non-multicast network. In this paper, we propose a handover scheme called application layer seamless switching(ALSS) to provide smooth real-time multimedia delivery across unicast and multicast networks. ALSS adopts a soft handover to achieve seamless playback during the handover period. A real-time streaming testbed is implemented to investigate the overall handover performance, especially the overlapping period where both network interfaces are receiving audio and video packets. Both the quality of service(QoS) and objective-mapped quality of experience(QoE) metrics are measured. Experimental results show that the overlapping period takes a minimum of 56 and 4 ms for multicast-to-unicast(M2U) and unicast-to-multicast(U2M) handover, respectively. The measured peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR) confirms that the frame-by-frame quality of the streamed video during the handover is at least 33 dB, which is categorized as good based on ITU-T recommendations. The estimated mean opinion score(MOS) in terms of video playback smoothness is also at a satisfactory level.