A synergistic approach of adapalene-loaded nanostructured lipid carriers,and vitamin C co-administration for treating acne

Abstract

The present study documents the fabrication and characterization of a topically applicable gel loaded with nanostructured lipid carriers (NLCs) of adapalene (ADA) and vitamin C (ascorbyl-6-palmitate [AP]). The NLCs were prepared by high pressure homogenization (HPH) method followed by incorporation into AP loaded gel. The fabricated system was characterized for size, poly dispersity index, entrapment efficiency (EE) and in vitro drug release properties, and was further investigated for skin compliance, skin transport characteristics (skin permeation and bio-distribution), rheological behavior, texture profile analysis and anti-acne therapeutic potential against testosterone-induced acne in male Wistar rats. The NLC-based formulation improved targeting of the skin epidermal layer and reducing systemic penetration. The co-administration of vitamin C led to an adjunct effect in acne therapy in physiological conditions. In brief, the present results suggest the potential of NLCs as a novel carrier for the dermal delivery of ADA and also the synergistic effect of vitamin C in topical therapeutics.     

High‐Throughput Block Optical DNA Sequence Identification

Optical techniques for molecular diagnostics or DNA sequencing generally rely on small molecule fluorescent labels, which utilize light with a wavelength of several hundred nanometers for detection. Developing a label‐free optical DNA sequencing technique will require nanoscale focusing of light, a high‐throughput and multiplexed identification method, and a data compression technique to rapidly identify sequences and analyze genomic heterogeneity for big datasets. Such a method should identify characteristic molecular vibrations using optical spectroscopy, especially in the “fingerprinting region” from ≈400–1400 cm^?1. Here, surface‐enhanced Raman spectroscopy is used to demonstrate label‐free identification of DNA nucleobases with multiplexed 3D plasmonic nanofocusing. While nanometer‐scale mode volumes prevent identification of single nucleobases within a DNA sequence, the block optical technique can identify A, T, G, and C content in DNA k‐mers. The content of each nucleotide in a DNA block can be a unique and high‐throughput method for identifying sequences, genes, and other biomarkers as an alternative to single‐letter sequencing. Additionally, coupling two complementary vibrational spectroscopy techniques (infrared and Raman) can improve block characterization. These results pave the way for developing a novel, high‐throughput block optical sequencing method with lossy genomic data compression using k‐mer identification from multiplexed optical data acquisition.     

A review on weight initialization strategies for neural networks

Over the past few years, neural networks have exhibited remarkable results for various applications in machine learning and computer vision. Weight initialization is a significant step employed before training any neural network. The weights of a network are initialized and then adjusted repeatedly while training the network. This is done till the loss converges to a minimum value and an ideal weight matrix is obtained. Thus weight initialization directly drives the convergence of a network. Therefore, the selection of an appropriate weight initialization scheme becomes necessary for end-to-end training. An appropriate technique initializes the weights such that the training of the network is accelerated and the performance is improved. This paper discusses various advances in weight initialization for neural networks. The weight initialization techniques in the literature adopted for feed-forward neural network, convolutional neural network, recurrent neural network and long short term memory network have been discussed in this paper. These techniques are classified as (1) initialization techniques without pre-training, which are further classified into random initialization and data-driven initialization, (2) initialization techniques with pre-training. The different weight initialization and weight optimization techniques which select optimal weights for non-iterative training mechanism have also been discussed. We provide a close overview of different initialization schemes in these categories. This paper concludes with discussions on existing schemes and the future scope for research.

     

Can bounded and self-interested agents be teammates? Application to planning in ad hoc teams

Planning for ad hoc teamwork is challenging because it involves agents collaborating without any prior coordination or communication. The focus is on principled methods for a single agent to cooperate with others. This motivates investigating the ad hoc teamwork problem in the context of self-interested decision-making frameworks. Agents engaged in individual decision making in multiagent settings face the task of having to reason about other agents’ actions, which may in turn involve reasoning about others. An established approximation that operationalizes this approach is to bound the infinite nesting from below by introducing level 0 models. For the purposes of this study, individual, self-interested decision making in multiagent settings is modeled using interactive dynamic influence diagrams (I-DID). These are graphical models with the benefit that they naturally offer a factored representation of the problem, allowing agents to ascribe dynamic models to others and reason about them. We demonstrate that an implication of bounded, finitely-nested reasoning by a self-interested agent is that we may not obtain optimal team solutions in cooperative settings, if it is part of a team. We address this limitation by including models at level 0 whose solutions involve reinforcement learning. We show how the learning is integrated into planning in the context of I-DIDs. This facilitates optimal teammate behavior, and we demonstrate its applicability to ad hoc teamwork on several problem domains and configurations.     

A thermodynamically consistent, nonlinear viscoelastic approach for modeling glassy polymers

A thermodynamically consistent nonlinear viscoelastic constitutive theory is derived to capture the wide range of behavior observed in glassy polymers, including such phenomena as yield, stress/volume/enthalpy relaxation, nonlinear stress-strain behavior in complex loading histories, and physical aging. The Helmholtz free energy for an isotropic, thermorheologically simple, viscoelastic material is constructed, and quantities such as the stress and entropy are determined from the Helmholtz potential using Rational Mechanics. The constitutive theory employs a generalized strain measure and a material clock, where the rate of relaxation is controlled by the internal energy that is likewise determined consistently from the viscoelastic Helmholtz potential. This is perhaps the simplest model consistent with the basic requirements of continuum physics, where the rate of relaxation depends upon the thermodynamic state of the polymer. The predictions of the model are compared with extensive experimental data in the following companion paper.     

Structure-preserving model reduction of nonlinear building thermal models

This paper proposes an aggregation-based model reduction method for nonlinear models of multi-zone building thermal dynamics. The full-order model, which is already a lumped-parameter approximation, quickly grows in state space dimension as the number of zones increases. An advantage of the proposed method, apart from being applicable to the nonlinear thermal models, is that the reduced model obtained has the same structure and physical intuition as the original model. The key to the methodology is an analogy between a continuous-time Markov chain and the linear part of the thermal dynamics. A recently developed aggregation-based method of Markov chains is employed to aggregate the large state space of the full-order model into a smaller one. Simulations are provided to illustrate tradeoffs between modeling error and computation time.     

Membrane‐liquid emulsion membrane process using a liquid emulsion membrane process using methane sulfonic acid as a strippant

The application of a liquid emulsion membrane (LEM) process in the recovery of zinc from aqueous solutions is discussed. The role of a stripping agent is very important in the LEM extraction process. Various stripping agents, such as hydrochloric, sulfuric, nitric and methane sulfonic acids, were tested for the stability of membrane. Methane sulfonic acid outperforms the other acids as a strippant. Further importance was given to the stability of the liquid emulsion membrane during the extraction process. The important variables affecting the LEM permeation process of zinc in a mechanically agitated contactor (MAC), such as residence time for extraction, speed of agitation, organic diluents, surfactant concentration and internal strip acid concentration, were systematically investigated. Emulsion swelling and breakage that occurred during these investigations were also described. Finally, the static mixer (SM) device was shown to have a very good potential for LEM extraction of zinc as it outperforms MAC.     

An ultrasonic feeding mechanism for continuous aerosol generation from cohesive powders

The dispersion of dry, cohesive micro- and nanosized powders has wide applications ranging from medical and environmental science to manufacturing technology. Being able to disperse the dry powder at a stable concentration over periods of time (～hour to several hours) is challenging to achieve, which we attempt to address with a novel dry powder dispersion technology. A portable, cost effective and simple dry powder dispersion device that uses ultrasonic energy for continuous feeding of aerosol particles to a de-agglomeration device is developed and tested with commercially available powders. The study is performed using 5?µm polyamide powder and rutile TiO₂ powders of 500, 100, and 30?nm mean size of primary particles. The ultrasonic dispersion device proved to be able to disperse all of these powders, which represent low-density material to high-density metal oxides, with stable concentration over periods that extend to an hour. From aerosol measurements to obtain the size distribution of various size particles, it is seen that the highly agglomerated powder particles are not easy to de-agglomerate as we go to the lower (nominal) sized powders because of the stronger inter-particle adhesion forces between nanoparticles compared to microparticles. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of particles in their native powder state and those collected after the dispersion showed significant difference in the agglomeration of the powder particles, which suggests partial success of the turbulent jet de-agglomeration employed.

Copyright © 2019 American Association for Aerosol Research     

Synthesis of succinylated poly(4‐hydroxystyrene) and its application for negative‐tone photoresist

Atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) was used to prepare poly(acetoxystyrene) (PAS) with a controlled molecular weight and narrow polydispersity. Using 1‐phenylethylbromide (PEBr)/CuBr/Cu(0)/2,2′‐bipyridine as an initiating system, the heterogeneous ATRP of 4‐acetoxystyrene was carried out to form PAS as a precursor polymer. The reaction follows the first‐order kinetics with respect to the conversion of monomer. A linear molecular weight (polydispersities Mw/Mn = 1.07–1.27) indicates the “living”/controlled nature of polymerization. The obtained PAS was chemically modified to obtain succinylated poly(hydroxystyrene) (Succ‐PHS). The formulation of Succ‐PHS, crosslinker (benzoguanamine‐formaldehyde), and triphenylsulfonium triflate (TPST) as a photo acid generator (PAG) was carried out by UV irradiation using an i‐line tool. The performance of the resultant polymer as the negative resist pattern photoresist for photolithography was studied with instrumental techniques. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 103: 3560–3566, 2007