An interest in substances of natural origin has been a subject that is increasing constantly-both those known for many years and recently discovered are of great interest to the researchers. This ...interest also applies to bee products because of their extensive nutritional and therapeutic properties; these products are known and used for several thousand years, but only recently, they became the subject of sparse documented scientific research. With the passing of time, it is difficult to determine what will be the wishes and requirements of the future consumers, what should be introduced to new technologies to ensure the demand for new products.
Recently, there has been an increasing demand for natural products, particularly the bee products. Bee bread and pollen, due to their nutritional and medicinal properties, are used for apitherapeutic purposes. These include about 200 different substances, such as free amino acids and vitamins. Special attention should be attributed to unsaturated fatty acids such as linoleic, linolenic, and arachidonic, which are found in pollen and bee bread.
The fashion for a healthy lifestyle leads to a situation where a number of people start taking care of their health. They search for the highest quality products, preferably with health benefits, rich in vitamins, valuable bioelements, and nutrients. Therefore, bee bread that is rich in beneficial ingredients has proved to fulfill these expectations. It constitutes a wholesome, biologically active nutrient, which can be used in the food industry.
•Bee bread provide energy and the biochemical components and nutritional value.•The nutritional value of pollen often is evaluated by protein concentrations.•Pollen and bee bread is used in the human diet as a food supplement.•Apitherapy is the field of apicultural science that involves the treatment of diseases.
ContextThe safety of products relating to the sleeping of infants has been a cause of concern for many years. While some progress has been made by industry, the public sector and consumer groups in ...terms of education, standards and regulations for these types of products, a need has emerged for a more comprehensive and evidence-based approach to manage this issue nationally. Part of this emerging need is in recognition that standards and regulations will rarely keep pace with product development. Further, the emergence of many niche products claiming to have health benefits or allude to able to reduce the risk factors associated with SUDI have fallen between the standards and regulatory cracks.ProcessIn 2019 the ACCC’s Product Safety Operations Group determined and approved the formation of a Working Group to develop an industry code to reduce the risk of injury and death associated with infant sleep and swaddling products with product safety regulators, industry and safe sleeping experts working together towards a common message and developing common standards across a range of products in an infant’s sleep environment. Susan Teerds was invited to chair an inter-sectoral working group to develop practical and effective strategies for a more holistic approach to ensuring only safe products are supplied that are also used safely. The group includes retailers, industry associations, medical and safe sleeping experts, regulators etc from Australia and New Zealand.OutcomeThe Guide has been completed and will have its international launch at World Safety 2022.
Chromatin is a macromolecular complex predominantly comprising DNA, histone proteins and RNA. The methylation of chromatin components is highly conserved as it helps coordinate the regulation of gene ...expression, DNA repair and DNA replication. Dynamic changes in chromatin methylation are essential for cell-fate determination and development. Consequently, inherited or acquired mutations in the major factors that regulate the methylation of DNA, RNA and/or histones are commonly observed in developmental disorders, ageing and cancer. This has provided the impetus for the clinical development of epigenetic therapies aimed at resetting the methylation imbalance observed in these disorders. In this Review, we discuss the cellular functions of chromatin methylation and focus on how this fundamental biological process is corrupted in cancer. We discuss methylation-based cancer therapies and provide a perspective on the emerging data from early-phase clinical trial therapies that target regulators of DNA and histone methylation. We also highlight promising therapeutic strategies, including monitoring chromatin methylation for diagnostic purposes and combination epigenetic therapy strategies that may improve immune surveillance in cancer and increase the efficacy of conventional and targeted anticancer drugs.
The Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) within the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tracking the use of nanotechnology in drug products by building and interrogating a technical ...profile of products containing nanomaterials submitted to CDER. In this Analysis, data from more than 350 products show an increase in the submissions of drug products containing nanomaterials over the last two decades. Of these, 65% are investigational new drugs, 17% are new drug applications and 18% are abbreviated new drug applications, with the largest class of products being liposomal formulations intended for cancer treatments. Approximately 80% of products have average particle sizes of 300 nm or lower. This analysis identifies several trends in the development of drug products containing nanomaterials, including the relative rate of approvals of these products, and provides a comprehensive overview on the landscape of nanotechnology application in medicine.
DNA has long been used as a template for the construction of helical assemblies of inorganic nanoparticles
. For example, gold nanoparticles decorated with DNA (or with peptides) can create helical ...assemblies
. But without such biological ligands, helices are difficult to achieve and their mechanism of formation is challenging to understand
. Atomically precise nanoclusters that are protected by ligands such as thiolate
have demonstrated hierarchical structural complexity in their assembly at the interparticle and intraparticle levels, similar to biomolecules and their assemblies
. Furthermore, carrier dynamics can be controlled by engineering the structure of the nanoclusters
. But these nanoclusters usually have isotropic structures
and often assemble into commonly found supercrystals
. Here we report the synthesis of homodimeric and heterodimeric gold nanoclusters and their self-assembly into superstructures. While the homodimeric nanoclusters form layer-by-layer superstructures, the heterodimeric nanoclusters self-assemble into double- and quadruple-helical superstructures. These complex arrangements are the result of two different motif pairs, one pair per monomer, where each motif bonds with its paired motif on a neighbouring heterodimer. This motif pairing is reminiscent of the paired interactions of nucleobases in DNA helices. Meanwhile, the surrounding ligands on the clusters show doubly or triply paired steric interactions. The helical assembly is driven by van der Waals interactions through particle rotation and conformational matching. Furthermore, the heterodimeric clusters have a carrier lifetime that is roughly 65 times longer than that of the homodimeric clusters. Our findings suggest new approaches for increasing complexity in the structural design and engineering of precision in supercrystals.
Accelerating new product development (NPD) to gain a first-mover advantage is crucial in today's competitive business landscape. This paper aims to examine the effective power structure in NPD ...projects through the lens of two divergent theoretical perspectives: Information Processing Theory (IPT) and Resource Dependence Theory (RDT). While IPT suggests the benefit of a balanced decision-making power among various subunits, RDT advocates for a concentrated decision power for faster consensus and efficiency. Our research specifically investigates whether a balanced or imbalanced R&D/marketing power structure is more conducive to accelerating NPD time. This focus stems from the recognition that the interplay between R&D and marketing is critical in shaping NPD outcomes, though we acknowledge the broader context of multifunctional collaboration in NPD, including aspects like manufacturing. The paper tests two competing hypotheses: one advocating a balanced R&D/marketing power structure as per IPT, and the other supporting a dominant R&D/marketing power structure in line with RDT. We surveyed project leaders, R&D, and marketing personnel from 126 NPD projects across 87 Taiwanese firms. The empirical results significantly endorse the balanced R&D/marketing power structure hypothesis, suggesting that a harmonious collaboration between these two key subunits can expedite NPD processes. Our findings contribute to both academic research and managerial practice by offering nuanced insights into optimizing power structures within NPD teams, particularly highlighting the efficacy of a balanced R&D/marketing approach in the context of the prevalent theories.
Managing the new product development (NPD) is a challenging mission, and most researches would argue that design is fundamentally linked to intentional action and it cannot emerge out of complexity. ...In fact, its complexity is generated by a large number of entities and actors which cooperate simultaneously with an unpredictable way to understand what customers want and then design product with diverse objectives in mind. A slight change in one activity may cause tremors everywhere. Within a dynamic environment and in order to meet concurrently these challenges, several researchers have implemented design for X (DFX) techniques. Regarding the availability of numerous DFX, the decision as to which one to apply remains absent. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive overview of the most prominent DFX techniques with respect to sustainability dimension as well as the cost ownership and product differentiation strategies. In addition to that, complex product necessitates the consideration of integrated DFX to optimize product life cycle from a more holistic perspective. In this respect, the paper addresses a systematic review from 1980 to 2018 by investigating and discussing the past and current research of each DFX techniques as well as for integrated ones. The key problems and issues that future DFX research should address have been identified and discussed in this paper.
In product development (PD) organizations, coordinating technical dependencies among teams with different expertise in overlapping processes is a fundamental challenge. This article takes a more ...sophisticated approach than prior methodologies to improve coordination via organizational clustering, by accounting for both team structural and attribute similarity from the perspective of social network analysis. We built models to quantify the impact of the overlapping processes on the interaction strength among PD teams, which we then used to construct structural similarity by combining tie strength and social cohesion among teams via the design structure matrix. To evaluate the organization network, we propose social embeddedness-related centrality indices within (intracluster) and across (intercluster) team groupings. To facilitate knowledge sharing, we base team attribute similarity on product- and process-related expertise among teams. We integrate the modularity index and an improved silhouette index to find an optimal number of clusters, which we then incorporate with team similarity measures as inputs to a spectral clustering algorithm. An industrial example illustrates the proposed model. The clustering results reinforce several managerial practices but also yield new insights, such as how to measure similarity among teams based on organizational network characteristics and how structural and attribute similarities impact the optimal organizational structure.
Abstract When viewing a product for the first time, a consumer's aesthetic perception is based on their knowledge of other products, artefacts, and concepts. These mental images function as visual ...references for consumers and affect the processing fluency of the new product. Designers frequently use visual references as inspiration during the research stage of the design process. It has been documented, however, that there is a gap between designer intent and consumer response; Consumers do not always realize the intent of designers nor draw on the same visual references when perceiving a product, which can reduce their processing fluency of new products. Visual references differ from one consumer to the other which make them difficult to study. In this paper, we argue for a new way of studying visual references: by analyzing the cognitive process that occurs when consumers view a new product and recognize aspects of that product that are similar to visual references in their memory. We present a framework of three approaches for recognizing this similarity and implications for design practice.
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