Novel strategy for encapsulation and targeted delivery of poorly water-soluble active substances

Carriers for targeted delivery and controlled release of poorly water-soluble active substances (PWSAS) are facing three challenges: (a) the encapsulation issues, (b) limitations of PWSAS water solubility, and (c) burst drug release which can be pharmacologically dangerous and economically inefficient. The present study brings a novel strategy for encapsulation and controlled release of PWSAS—caffeine in concentrations which are higher than its maximal water solubility without the possibility of burst effect. The modification of hydrophilic carrier based on poly(methacylic acid) was done using casein and liposomes. To further increase the maximal caffeine loading inside the carrier nicotinamide was used. The release study of the encapsulated PWSAS was elaborated with respect to morphology of the carriers and interactions that could be established between its structural components. The carriers swelling and the release of caffeine and nicotinamide were also investigated depending on caffeine concentration, the presence of different liposomal formulations and the volume ratio of liposomal formulation, in three media with different pH simulating the path of the carrier through the human gastrointestinal tract. The synthesized carriers are promising candidates for encapsulation of PWSAS in concentrations which are higher than its maximal water solubility and for the targeted delivery of those dosages.     

Simultaneous electrolytic production of xylitol and xylonic acid from xylose

A new electrocatalytic process for simultaneous electrolytic production of xylitol and xylonic acid or the corresponding xylonate salts directly from -d-xylose in alkaline solutions of neutral salt as supporting electrolyte has been developed and presented. An electrocatalytically active cathode coating with essentially hydridic features has been employed to enhance Faradaic yields in xylitol production at low current densities by heterogeneous reaction of hydrogenation with H-adatoms, and the entire mechanism has been proved by experimental evidence. An anionic selective anodic coating for titanium substrate was also used to suppress oxygen evolution and optimize the xylonic acid production by direct oxidation with anodically generated bromine, and to carry out the electrode process at almost equilibrium potential. The kinetic effect of specifically adsorbable anions for decreasing cathodic current yields in xylitol production and the resulting necessity for membrane separation of catholyte from anolyte, with proper optimization of the supporting neutral salt composition, has also been emphasized.Paper partly presented at 39th and 40th ISE-Meetings at Glasgow UK, 1988 and Kyoto, Japan, 1989.     

The shift level of the utilization of capacity as the stochastic variable in work sampling

This paper aims to explain and justify the necessity and the importance of using the shift level of the utilization of capacity as the stochastic variable in determining the total level of the capacity utilization in the production process by using the method of work sampling. The aim of the paper is realized through experimental research on the work sample containing 74 Serbian companies. The conclusion is that the shift level of capacity utilization as the stochastic variable in work sampling is the model that solves the problem of determining the total level of capacity utilization in a convenient way with accurate results.     

Service outage based power and rate allocation for parallel fading channels

The service outage based allocation problem explores variable-rate transmission schemes and combines the concepts of ergodic capacity and outage capacity for fading channels. A service outage occurs when the transmission rate is below a given basic rate r/sub o/. The allocation problem is to maximize the expected rate subject to the average power constraint and the constraint that the outage probability is less than /spl epsi/. A general class of probabilistic power allocation schemes is considered for an M-parallel fading channel model. The optimum power allocation scheme is derived and shown to be deterministic except at channel states of a boundary set. The resulting service outage achievable rate ranges from 1-/spl epsi/ of the outage capacity up to the ergodic capacity with increasing average power. Two near-optimum schemes are also derived by exploiting the fact that the outage probability is usually small. The second near-optimum scheme significantly reduces the computational complexity of the optimum solution; moreover, it has a simple structure for the implementation of transmission of mixed real-time and non-real-time services.     

The ubiquitous camera: an in-depth study of camera phone use

Little in-depth data exists regarding what users actually do with their camera phones. Our goal was thus to understand how people use camera phone images for social and personal purposes and affective and functional purposes. We had two main objectives. The first was to explore the range and diversity of use to help broaden our outlook on current and future camera phone use. The second was to elucidate the characteristics and context of use for different activities to learn how we might better support such activities.     

Encapsulation for preservation of functionality and targeted delivery of bioactive food components

There has been a tremendous increase in the number of food products containing bioactive components with a health promoting or disease preventing effect. Bioactive food components can be divided into bioactive molecules and bioactive living cells (probiotics). Both bioactive molecules and bioactive living cells may benefit from encapsulation since many report low survival of bioactivity due to adverse effects of (i) processing and storage in the products that serve as vehicles and due to (ii) deleterious circumstances during transport through the gastrointestinal tract. For probiotics, it may even be mandatory to apply protection by encapsulation as the survival of probiotics in traditional products such as in dairy foods and powdered formulas is low. Encapsulation promotes not only viability but more importantly also protects the functionality, and may facilitate targeted release in specific parts of the gut. Different encapsulation approaches qualify for protection of bioactive food components. The most commonly applied technologies are emulsification, coacervation, spray drying, spray cooling, freeze drying, fluid bed coating and extrusion technologies, but also more expensive techniques such as liposome encapsulation, and cyclodextrin encapsulation are used. When targeted release is desired in combination with adequate protection in the product, it is essential to realize which processes in the human gut can be applied to facilitate targeted release. The majority of systems that have been used in the past were either sensitive to mechanical stress, pH, or transport time variations in the gut. More recent systems take advantages of the different enzyme concentrations associated with variations in the composition of the microbiota in different parts of the gut. The latter system should receive more attention in the food industry as it allows for precise release of bioactive food components. The principle of targeted release by enzymatic activity of the microbiota is compatible with many carbohydrates that are generally regarded as safe (GRAS).     

Voting as the optimal static pessimistic scheme for managingreplicated data

This paper investigates the problem of finding an optimal static pessimistic replica control scheme. It has been widely accepted that coteries (proposed by Garcia-Molina and Barbara) provide the most general framework for such schemes. We demonstrate that voting schemes, a very small subset of static pessimistic schemes, are optimal for fully connected networks with negligible link failure rates, as well as for Ethernet systems. We also show that voting is not optimal for somewhat more general systems. We propose a modification of the algorithm of Z. Tong and R.Y. Kain (1988) for computing optimal voting in operation independent case, so that it runs in linear (rather than exponential) time. Finally, we propose the first efficient algorithm for computing the optimal vote assignment and appropriate thresholds for fully connected networks when relative frequencies of read and write operations are known. We also extend this result to Ethernet systems     

Adaptive transmission with finite code rates

This work examines a transmission system which adapts a finite set of code rates and a continuously varying transmit power. We propose a technique for finding the average reliable throughput (ART)-maximizing policy satisfying an average power constraint for a slow fading additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. ART is a measure motivated by the information outage and can, for example, be argued to characterize the long-term average throughput of a data packet transmission system with a transmit queue and a feedback protocol which requests retransmission of erroneously received packets. Given the size of the code rate set L, the ART-maximizing policy has the following properties. 1. For a given set of code rates, the optimum allocation policy suggests quantizing the fading state space into a set of L+1 corresponding intervals. For each quantization interval the optimal policy specifies a minimum transmitted power assignment which guarantees zero information outage. The optimum average power assignments across quantization intervals have a waterfilling relationship with respect to the interval channel quality measure. 2. The joint optimization of quantization intervals and the corresponding rate assignments are shown to have multiple local maxima. Nevertheless, this optimization problem can be reduced to a simple one-dimensional search over a parameter which determines the outage interval. Numerical results show that, in a Rayleigh-fading channel, there is only a 1-dB gap between the ergodic capacity and the throughput of a two-rate adaptive transmission system when the throughput is less than 6 bits/s/Hz. A special case of our optimal policy assignment is the optimal power and rate policy for an adaptive M-QAM system.     

Nonlinear group-blind multiuser detection

A nonlinear group-blind technique is developed for joint detection of some given users' data in a CDMA uplink environment with the presence of unknown interference. This method performs the so-called “slowest-descent search” over a likelihood function of the desired users, starting from the estimate closest to the unconstrained maximizer of the likelihood function, and along mutually orthogonal directions where this likelihood function drops to the slowest. Simulation results show that this new nonlinear technique offers substantial performance improvement over the previously proposed linear group-blind multiuser detectors with little attendant increase in computational complexity. The problem of group-blind multiuser detection in the presence of both unknown interference and impulsive ambient noise is also treated under the framework of slowest-descent search, with the aid of a novel subspace-based robust interference cancellation scheme. It is seen that this robust group-blind method significantly outperforms the robust blind multiuser detection scheme proposed previously