Alex Brown

In March 2020, I flew home to Australia from the US. It was a time of great uncertainty, and it now seems like a very long time ago: I was in the US when the country had its first confirmed case of coronavirus, Donald Trump was still president, and Joe Biden was floundering badly in the early Democratic primaries for the presidential nomination. At the time, Mike Bloomberg looked as if he were the man most likely; I was in Montgomery, Alabama, when Biden turned it all around on Super Tuesday. On my way home, half of the airport at LAX was closed, and on my flight was a family whose version of personal protective gear involved wearing multiple garbage bags secured by rubber bands. It was impossible to buy masks in the US before my departure, and no-one on our flight of nearly 400 people was wearing a mask. I have encountered many dangerous situations in a lifetime of travel. But perhaps the most dangerous of them all was to fly halfway across the globe in the midst of a global pandemic. ... Continue reading →

  Apart from the added layers of anxiety and stress, it was, it’s true, wonderful to see a world beyond my own, to see that there was still a world out there where people were going about their business much as they had before. It was good to have conversations that weren’t about Covid. And there were moments when the healing power of travel took hold, when for a short time I could forget the difficulties and fears of the past two years. There were moments, in fact – sitting around a table discussing local culinary traditions, hiking through a cloud forest looking for birds, swimming in a torrential tropical downpour – when it was easy to forget that there had been a pandemic at all. At such times, it was as if I had never been away. Continue reading →

Almost two years after I returned from the US, the BBC asked me to go to Seychelles and I finally had the chance to travel internationally again. Somewhat suitably, my departure was delayed when I caught Covid. After so long trying to avoid the disease, I felt a perverse sense of relief to finally be one of the daily case numbers. It would add a whole new level of anxiety to those last days before departure – applications for authorisation to enter Seychelles, permissions to return to Australia and Victoria, for example. Worst of all was the Covid-19 PCR test that I had to do no more than 72 hours prior to my departure for Seychelles. Although I was fully recovered, there was still a real risk that I could test positive, throwing my plans into chaos. It was a strange way to prepare for a trip. Fewer than 36 hours before I was due to leave, the test result came back negative. Only then did I believe that I was actually going. After such a prolonged build-up, the trip itself was ... Continue reading →

In the early days back home, it felt safe to be locked up at home. After my two weeks of isolation at home, on brief forays out, people were nicer. There was a sense of some frightening but shared experience. People crowded around radios to hear the latest news and pandemic announcements, and it felt like the stories I’ve heard of wartime: it was a time of great peril and solidarity. Over the nearly two years that have followed, all of this became the new normal – the reduced horizons, and the regular, worsening news reports filled with dire projections of a world struggling to cope. The sense of solidarity faded as the harsh reality hit home, that this would not be over in months, that the death toll would run into the millions, and that it could be a very long time before we could travel again to places and people we longed to see. In two years, my only journey outside my home state of Victoria, was a ten-day trip into the Great Sandy Desert, northwest of Alice Springs. ... Continue reading →

by Anthony Ham (Post Pandemic Travel Feature) In March 2020, I flew home to Australia from the US. It was a time of great uncertainty, and it now seems like a very long time ago: I was in the US when the country had its first confirmed case of coronavirus, Donald Trump was still president, and Joe Biden was floundering badly in the early Democratic primaries for the presidential nomination. At the time, Mike Bloomberg looked as if he were the man most likely; I was in Montgomery, Alabama, when Biden turned it all around on Super Tuesday. On my way home, half of the airport at LAX was closed, and on my flight was a family whose version of personal protective gear involved wearing multiple garbage bags secured by rubber bands. It was impossible to buy masks in the US before my departure, and no-one on our flight of nearly 400 people was wearing a mask. I have encountered many dangerous situations in a lifetime of travel. But perhaps the most dangerous of them all was to fly halfway ... Continue reading →

The cytotoxic payload or warhead is an important part of ADC. It is activated after being released from ADC in the cytoplasm of tumor cells and can destroy tumor cells even at low doses. The antibody component in ADC cannot carry a large amount of cytotoxic payload due to its structure. Therefore, the cytotoxic payload in the new generation of ADCs must be extremely toxic to eliminate most tumor cells, even with minimal payload delivered. ADC cytotoxic agents need to be studied under in vitro conditions to determine whether they are a substrates, inhibitors, or inducers of metabolic enzymes (such as cytochrome P-450 isoenzymes (CYP), and certain transport enzymes, etc.). These studies help to clarify the elimination/enhancing effects of in vivo factors on cytotoxic agents. The cytotoxic payload should also remain stable during blood preparation or storage and circulation. Incompletely stable cytotoxic payloads may be transformed into undesirable drugs during binding or storage. The ... Continue reading →

B Cell Receptor (BCR) signaling pathway overview BCR is a transmembrane protein complex that controls B cell maturation, survival, apoptosis, and the production of plasma cell antibodies starting from the expression form of pro-BCR and pre-BCR. BCR signaling is connected by a network of kinases and phosphatases, and its pathways can be divided into two types: chronically activated BCR and tetanic BCR. Chronically activated BCR is an antigen-dependent process, mainly using NF-kB and MAPK/ERK pathways. Tetanic BCR is antigen-independent and maintains the survival of B cells through PI3K/AKT pathways. BTK, a non-receptor intracellular kinase, belongs to the TEC family of tyrosine kinases and is an important part of the BCR signaling pathway. BTK protein consists of 659 amino acids and 5 domains (PH, TH, SH3, SH2, kinase domain), among which Y223 of the SH3 domain and Y551 of the kinase domain are two key tyrosine phosphorylation sites. types of BTK inhibitors and their binding sites ... Continue reading →