Tran Ngo

With few exceptions, humans are incapable of fully recovering from severe physical trauma. Due to these limitations, the field of regenerative medicine seeks to find clinically viable ways to repair permanently damaged tissue. There are two main approaches to regenerative medicine: promoting endogenous repair of the wound, or transplanting a material to replace the injured tissue. In recent years, these two methods have fused with the development of biomaterials that act as a scaffold and mobilize the body’s natural healing capabilities. This process involves not only promoting stem cell behavior, but by also inducing activity of the immune system. Through understanding the immune interactions with biomaterials, we can understand how the immune system participates in regeneration and wound healing. In this review, we will focus on biomaterials that promote endogenous tissue repair, with discussion on their interactions with the immune system.

With its increasing integration into the world economy, agricultural exports and rural incomes in Vietnam have increased substantially in recent years. At the sub-national level, however, there are concerns that not all regions and categories of agricultural producers have and will benefit from the ongoing liberalization of agricultural markets. Vietnam's elongated geography and lack of spatial market integration pose special problems in this regard. Accordingly, this study aims to answer three interrelated questions: (a) whether there is spatial integration between paddy markets in the North and South of Vietnam; (b) whether there is spatial integration in paddy markets within the North and within the South; and, (c) if within-region integration is stronger and faster than between-region integration. The empirical model we develop to answer these questions, uses estimates of transfer costs to generalize the well known model of spatial market integration due to Ravallion to allo...

Full-day schooling has been implemented in Vietnam to deal with the lack of instructional time in primary education in regard to international standards. Yet full-day schooling may impact educational inequality by filling the gap in terms of instructional time between children with different family background. Indeed, well-off families use to compensate the lack of instructional time by private tutoring. This paper investigates whether the huge development of full-day schooling in recent years can improve equality of opportunity in Vietnam by using the data from the Young Lives School Survey 2011-2012. Firstly, it examines the variation in instructional time and school resources between pupils with and without fullday schooling from different social background. It then investigates the learning progress associated with full-day schooling across social background. Evidence implies that full-day schooling cannot narrow the inequality of opportunity in learning achievement at this stag...

ABSTRACTAsymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and delayed implementation of diagnostics have led to poorly defined viral prevalence rates. To address this, we analyzed seropositivity in US adults who have not previously been diagnosed with COVID-19. Individuals with characteristics that reflect the US population (n = 11,382) and who had not previously been diagnosed with COVID-19 were selected by quota sampling from 241,424 volunteers (ClinicalTrials.govNCT04334954). Enrolled participants provided medical, geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic information and 9,028 blood samples. The majority (88.7%) of samples were collected between May 10th and July 31st, 2020. Samples were analyzed via ELISA for anti-Spike and anti-RBD antibodies. Estimation of seroprevalence was performed by using a weighted analysis to reflect the US population. We detected an undiagnosed seropositivity rate of 4.6% (95% CI: 2.6 – 6.5%). There was distinct regional variability, with heightened seropositivity i...

Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and delayed implementation of diagnostics have led to poorly defined viral prevalence rates in the United States and elsewhere. To address this, we analyzed seropositivity in 9089 adults in the United States who had not been diagnosed previously with COVID-19. Individuals with characteristics that reflected the U.S. population (n = 27,716) were selected by quota sampling from 462,949 volunteers. Enrolled participants (n = 11,382) provided medical, geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic information and dried blood samples. Survey questions coincident with the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey, a large probability-based national survey, were used to adjust for selection bias. Most blood samples (88.7%) were collected between 10 May and 31 July 2020 and were processed using ELISA to measure seropositivity (IgG and IgM antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and the spike protein receptor binding domain). The overall weighted und...