The umbilical cord represents the link between mother and fetus during pregnancy. This cord is usually discarded as a biological waste after the child's birth; however, its importance as a “store ...house” of stem cells has been explored recently. We developed a method of simultaneous isolation of endothelial cells (ECs) from the vein and mesenchymal stem cells from umbilical cord Wharton's jelly of the same cord. The isolation protocol has been simplified, modified, and improvised with respect to choice of enzyme and enzyme mixture, digestion time, cell yield, cell growth, and culture medium. Isolated human umbilical vascular ECs (hUVECs) were positive for von-Willibrand factor, a classical endothelial marker, and could form capillary-like structures when seeded on Matrigel, thus proving their functionality. The isolated human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (hUCMSCs) were found positive for CD44, CD90, CD 73, and CD117 and were found negative for CD33, CD34, CD45, and CD105 surface markers; they were also positive for cytoskeleton markers of smooth muscle actin and vimentin. The hUCMSCs showed multilineage differentiation potential and differentiated into adipogenic, chondrogenic, osteogenic, and neuronal lineages under influence of lineage specific differentiation medium. Thus, isolating endothelial cells as well as mesenchymal cells from the same umbilical cord could lead to complete utilization of the available tissue for the tissue engineering and cell therapy.
Background & objectives: India has been reporting the cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) since January 30, 2020. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) formulated and established ...laboratory surveillance for COVID-19. In this study, an analysis of the surveillance data was done to describe the testing performance and descriptive epidemiology of COVID-19 cases by time, place and person.
Methods: The data were extracted from January 22 to April 30, 2020. The frequencies of testing performance were described over time and by place. We described cases by time (epidemic curve by date of specimen collection; seven-day moving average), place (area map) and person (attack rate by age, sex and contact status), and trends were represented along with public health measures and events.
Results: Between January 22 and April 30, 2020, a total of 1,021,518 individuals were tested for severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). Testing increased from about 250 individuals per day in the beginning of March to 50,000 specimens per day by the end of April 2020. Overall, 40,184 (3.9%) tests were reported positive. The proportion of positive cases was highest among symptomatic and asymptomatic contacts, 2-3-fold higher than among those with severe acute respiratory infection, or those with an international travel history or healthcare workers. The attack rate (per million) by age was highest among those aged 50-69 yr (63.3) and was lowest among those under 10 yr (6.1). The attack rate was higher among males (41.6) than females (24.3). The secondary attack rate was 6.0 per cent. Overall, 99.0 per cent of 736 districts reported testing and 71.1 per cent reported COVID-19 cases.
Interpretation & conclusions: The coverage and frequency of ICMR's laboratory surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 improved over time. COVID-19 was reported from most parts of India, and the attack rate was more among men and the elderly and common among close contacts. Analysis of the data indicates that for further insight, additional surveillance tools and strategies at the national and sub-national levels are needed.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that has changed the traditional way of living into a high tech life style. Smart city, smart homes, pollution control, energy saving, smart transportation, ...smart industries are such transformations due to IoT. A lot of crucial research studies and investigations have been done in order to enhance the technology through IoT. However, there are still a lot of challenges and issues that need to be addressed to achieve the full potential of IoT. These challenges and issues must be considered from various aspects of IoT such as applications, challenges, enabling technologies, social and environmental impacts etc. The main goal of this review article is to provide a detailed discussion from both technological and social perspective. The article discusses different challenges and key issues of IoT, architecture and important application domains. Also, the article bring into light the existing literature and illustrated their contribution in different aspects of IoT. Moreover, the importance of big data and its analysis with respect to IoT has been discussed. This article would help the readers and researcher to understand the IoT and its applicability to the real world.
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CEKLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, UL, UM, UPUK
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•TPGS is a PEG/vitamin E based nonionic amphiphile with GRAS status.•Its core–shell micelles remarkably solubilize the hydrophobic drugs.•It improves dispersion stability and ...circulation half-life of multi-particulate formulations.•It downregulates efflux transporters and re-sensitizes drug resistant tumor cells.•Chemical modification of TPGS have been explored to improve its targetability.
α-Tocopheryl polyethylene glycol succinate (vitamin E-TPGS or TPGS) is a nonionic amphiphile synthesized by the esterification of vitamin E succinate. It has been categorized as a safe excipient by US-FDA and EMA. Like other polyethylene glycol (PEG) condensates, TPGS spontaneously forms kinetically stable core–shell micelles (diameter 12–15 nm) and exhibits interesting properties as solubilizing agent, emulsifier, dispersant and gelling agent. Its aggregation behavior can be tuned in association with other amphiphiles and organic additives. These properties have been exploited for developing a variety of vesicular, semisolid and multi-particulate drug formulations. It improves the bioavailability of drugs through permeation enhancement and down-regulation of P-glycoproteins. Multimodal therapeutic platforms have been explored following its chemical modification with recognizable and stimuli-responsive groups. Research in the past two decades has revealed its specific role in mediating the re-sensitization of multi-drug resistant cancer cells. This review describes the physicochemical and biological properties of TPGS relevant to drug delivery applications. We have emphasized on the role of TPGS in improving the bioavailability and targetability of anticancer drugs.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
This article contributes a new configuration of the current mode (CM) sinusoidal oscillator employing a single voltage differencing transconductance amplifier (VDTA), as an active building block, and ...all grounded passive elements. This fully electronically tunable circuit offers independent control of its design parameters i.e., oscillation condition (OC) and oscillation frequency (OF). To validate the design concept, along with the regular mathematics, simulations have been performed using PSPICE software. Experimental results have been obtained by the commercially available IC i.e., LM13700, to validate the theoretical expectations.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Recent developments in the Internet of Things (IoT) and various communication technologies have reshaped numerous application areas. Nowadays, IoT is assimilated into various medical devices and ...equipment, leading to the progression of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Therefore, various IoMT-based healthcare applications are deployed and used in the day-to-day scenario. Traditionally, machine learning (ML) models use centralized data compilation and learning that is impractical in pragmatic healthcare frameworks due to rising privacy and data security issues. Federated Learning (FL) has been observed as a developing distributed collective paradigm, the most appropriate for modern healthcare framework, that manages various stakeholders (e.g., patients, hospitals, laboratories, etc.) to carry out training of the models without the actual exchange of sensitive medical data. Consequently, in this work, the authors present an exhaustive survey on the security of FL-based IoMT applications in smart healthcare frameworks. First, the authors introduced IoMT devices, their types, applications, datasets, and the IoMT security framework in detail. Subsequently, the concept of FL, its application domains, and various tools used to develop FL applications are discussed. The significant contribution of FL in deploying secure IoMT systems is presented by focusing on FL-based IoMT applications, patents, real-world FL-based healthcare projects, and datasets. A comparison of FL-based security techniques with other schemes in the smart healthcare ecosystem is also presented. Finally, the authors discussed the challenges faced and potential future research recommendations to deploy secure FL-based IoMT applications in smart healthcare frameworks.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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