Opportunity modality

Although we have made significant progress in our understanding of the role of combined modality therapy, much remains to be accomplished. Current and future research may provide exciting opportunities to improve response and survival for patients with tumors previously associated with a dismal prognosis. 

Patients often undergo a protracted course [e.g., acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), newly diagnosed cancer, primary degenerative dementia], whose ultimate outcome may be years away. This allows for numerous opportunities to intervene with a variety of therapeutic modalities including various psychotropics, depending on the particular phase or presenting symptoms. The eventual goal of all these therapeutic interventions is to provide the best circumstances possible to enhance the quality of life and ultimately for a peaceful death. 

There are a variety of ways of classifying opportunities. Opportunities may be classified depending upon their sphere of influence and modality of effect. Commercial or entrepreneurial opportunities may be classified depending upon their locus within the enterprise s value chain. Each of these is briefly discussed. 

A company s business developer needs to be aware of direct and indirect competition as actors and factors in terms of the market as well as in specific product challenges. It may be that the market opportunity can be treated by different modalities such as in the treatment of metabolic diseases like type II diabetes. Modifying someone s diet so that they lose weight can be... 

The application areas of bimodal polyethylenes are the same as for corresponding uni-modal resins. However, improved product property combinations, such as stiffness-impact balance, result in products with higher performance. For example, without bimodal polyethylene and control over the MWD and comonomer incorporation, development of HDPE pipe materials with higher pressure classification would not have been possible [15, 16]. Another new opportunity is material reduction (source reduction) without compromising the properties of the ready-made plastic products. Depending on the end use, e.g. in film application a thickness reduction of 10-30% is possible. 

Efficient biological responses to PDT require three components and this renders PDT a complicated treatment modality. There is, however, some opportunity for an... 

Selectivity of PDT effects may also be enhanced by appropriate manipulation of the illumination process. The spatial control of the illumination is an obvious advantage of PDT, but it is also an important source of the complexity of this modality [48,49]. Since most photosensitizers are non-toxic in the dark at the clinically used doses, only illuminated areas will be damaged by the treatment. The introduction of fiber-optic coupling to lasers has opened a range of opportunities to treat not only superficial lesions, but also more complex body sites, such as the abdominal cavity. An additional way to achieve specificity is the timing of the illumination. Since photosensitizer distribution is dependent on the time after delivery (initially more vascular, later more in tumor cells) [50,51], the time of illumination is an important tool in tailoring PDT for specific applications. 

This is the most frequent type of TMA encountered in the literature. This TMA encompasses most/all available cases in a particular repository. The primary use of this type of TMA is to evaluate the frequency of expression of a given antigen in a particular disease/cancer type. This approach may be the best design modality for smaller repositories because it provides an opportunity to evaluate all available cases. This approach, however, has a major limitation many projects address questions that do not require the significant numbers of cases included in a consecutive cases TMA. The most frequent reason for exclusion is that these cases do not address the experimental question. 

Those seeking to develop therapeutic products will need to understand these dynamic interactions and the consequent potential changes in one or more society s approach to its healthcare. Indeed, this is another opportunity for pharmaceutical medicine to broaden. The speciality should cover all pharmacologically active treatments, all disease preventions and all health maintenance modalities. The objective is to maximize patient benefits and extend product lifecycles, as well as company sales. Clearly, pharmaceutical medicine requires an ability to read the direction society is taking and an understanding that, on a global basis, various... 

Terinte, N., Manda, B.M.K., Taylor, J., Schuster, K.C., Patel, M.K., 2014. Environmental assessment of coloured fabrics and opportunities for value creation spin-dyeing versus conventional dyeing of modal fabrics. Journal of Cleaner Production 72, 127—138. 

Combinatorial Y and TACE presents an interesting opportunity to assess the cumulative effect of these modalities in effecting tumor kill. Intraarterial infusion of Y in an aerobic environment (non-stasis) could be followed by TACE after the radioactive effect diminishes to sub-therapeutic levels (approximately 2 weeks post Y treatment). TACE administration with cytotoxic tumor exposure in a hypoxic environment would then address any viable (radioresistant) cells that remained. 

A second area in need of study is the interaction between visual and chemical stimuli and the learning of chemical cues. Field (Wisenden et al., in press) and laboratory studies (Abrahams and Hartman, 2000) have indicated that a fish s behaviour is affected when given the opportunity to use visual and chemical cues together versus being presented with chemical cues alone. In response to the results outlined both in the literature and in section 5.2, Pollock and Chivers are currently exploring the interaction between learning and the two sensory modalities as a potential explanation for why learning does not occur as readily when populations occur in complex habitat. 

---