Despite vaccines are the main strategy to control the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, their effectiveness could not be enough for individuals with immunosuppression. In these cases, as well as in patients with moderate/severe COVID-19, passive immunization with anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoglobulins could be a therapeutic alternative. We used caprylic acid precipitation to prepare a pilot-scale batch of anti-SARS-CoV-2 intravenous immunoglobulins (IVIg) from plasma of donors immunized with the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) anti-COVID-19 vaccine (VP-IVIg) and compared their in vitro efficacy and safety with those of a similar formulation produced from plasma of COVID-19 convalescent donors (CP-IVIg). Both formulations showed immunological, physicochemical, biochemical, and microbiological characteristics that meet the specifications of IVIg formulations. Moreover, the concentration of anti-RBD and ACE2-RBD neutralizing antibodies was higher in VP-IVIg than in CP-IVIg. In concordance, plaque reduction neutralization tests showed inhibitory concentrations of 0.03–0.09 g/L in VP-IVIg and of 0.06–0.13 in CP-IVIg. Thus, VP-IVIg has in vitro efficacy and safety profiles that justify their evaluation as therapeutic alternative for clinical cases of COVID-19. Precipitation with caprylic acid could be a simple, feasible, and affordable alternative to produce formulations of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IVIg to be used therapeutically or prophylactically to confront the COVID-19 pandemic in middle and low-income countries.

No abstract

No abstract

Peri-urban landscapes (PULs) play an important role in the supply of ecosystem services (ES), which support development and well-being in urban and rural areas. Understanding the impacts of policy actions on the supply of ES and how they might contribute to the achievement of a range of sustainable development goals (SDG) is a key challenge, especially for spatial planning. The aim of this article is to explore the links between the ES supply from PULs and how they support different SDGs from a global perspective. For this, we implemented a review of the literature oriented to identify (1) the most relevant ES provided by PULs at a global level, (2) how they support the achievement of different SDG, and (3) the type of policy interventions and actors related to PULs. We identified the supply of 17 different ES by PULs and a relationship to 12 SDGs. In 58% of the cases, the SDGs were related to two ES sections, where regulation and maintenance was dominant. Pure research was the main type of intervention, mainly at the municipal scale. Increasing the cooperation between science and policy and expanding the scale of analysis beyond municipal boundaries are critical aspects.

The topic of ‘judicial discretion’ has been at the center of the debate on legal interpretation in the philosophy of law.1 In a general sense, ‘discretion’ here refers to the exercise of a judgment by a decision-maker due to the lack of legal constraints affecting one’s ability to decide a case. The most fundamental question on this topic is ‘do judges have discretion when interpreting the law?’ There are three kinds of answers to this query. One kind of answer states that judges never have discretion.2 Another kind of answer states that judges always have discretion in interpretation.3 The third kind of answer states that judges sometimes have discretion when interpreting the law, and sometimes they do not.4