The sourcing and use of high physical resemblance personal protective equipment to train healthcare workers, improve confidence and conserve medical-grade equipment

Personal protective equipment (PPE) is essential for healthcare worker (HCW) safety. Conservation of PPE for clinical use during the COVID-19 pandemic reduced its availability for training, necessitating an innovative approach to sourcing high physical resemblance PPE (HPR-PPE). We present a case study of crowd-sourcing of HPR-PPE to train HCWs. Survey results indicated that HPR-PPE enabled high-fidelity practise of PPE application and removal, aided procedure recall, improved user confidence and was sufficiently similar to medical-grade PPE. HPR-PPE provided a novel and cost-effective alternative. We also demonstrated that medical-grade PPE can be sourced from non-medical institutions and businesses during a pandemic.

Biotransformations of anticancer ruthenium(III) complexes: an X-ray absorption spectroscopic study

An anti-metastatic drug, NAMI-A ((ImH)[Ru(III) Cl4 (Im)(dmso)]; Im=imidazole, dmso=S-bound dimethylsulfoxide), and a cytotoxic drug, KP1019 ((IndH)[Ru(III) Cl4 (Ind)2 ]; Ind=indazole), are two Ru-based anticancer drugs in human clinical trials. Their reactivities under biologically relevant conditions, including aqueous buffers, protein solutions or gels (e.g, albumin, transferrin and collagen), undiluted blood serum, cell-culture medium and human liver (HepG2) cancer cells, were studied by Ru K-edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). These XAS data were fitted from linear combinations of spectra of well-characterised Ru compounds. The absence of XAS data from the parent drugs in these fits points to profound changes in the coordination environments of Ru(III) . The fits point to the presence of Ru(IV/III) clusters and binding of Ru(III) to S-donor groups, amine/imine and carboxylato groups of proteins. Cellular uptake of KP1019 is approximately 20-fold higher than that of NAMI-A under the same conditions, but it diminishes drastically after the decomposition of KP1019 in cell-culture media, which indicate that the parent complex is taken in by cells through passive diffusion.