Current State-Of-Play of the EU Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product (ATMP) Field, With an Emphasis on Belgian Human Cell and Tissue Products.

The late 1980s saw the emergence of experimental therapies based on human cell and tissue products (HCTPs) within academic and hospital settings, several of them wound healing related. In 2008, the European Commission introduced the Regulation on advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs), defining many of these HCTPs as ATMPs, and more specifically as somatic cell therapy medicinal products (sCTMPs) or tissue-engineered products (TEPs). In 2013, we predicted that the ATMP regulation would adversely impact Member States' health care systems and would threaten the sustainability of many HCTPs provided by public health institutions. To assess the current ATMP state of play and investigate whether these predictions ultimately came true, we consulted relevant scientific and trade literature and official competent authority reports and surveyed the former Belgian HCTP producers. We found that the ATMP Regulation produced 19 authorised ATMPs, with 16 of them (84.2%) belonging to the gene therapy medicinal product (GTMP) class and only 3 HCTPs (15.8%), 2 TEPs and 1 sCTMP. List prices varied according to the ATMP class, with public health insurances struggling to reimburse ATMPs, especially the exuberantly priced GTMPs. This led to marketing authorization withdrawals, and crowd funding approaches and lotteries to determine who would receive lifesaving treatments. A hospital exemption (HE) scheme was enacted to protect ATMPs not intended for commercial exploitation. Whilst limited financial resources generally hampered HE utilisation by public actors, stringent regulatory policies made it virtually impossible in Belgium, resulting in meaningful HCTPs no longer being available to surgeons and their patients

Premodern studies? Studying the Burgundian late Medieval political ideology through a postcolonial lens

Based on my doctoral thesis, defended on December 16th, 2024, at the UCLouvain and titled “D’Istanbul à Grenade, fabrique des altérités musulmanes en pays bourguignons (1363-1483). Représentations, pouvoir, idéologie”, I aim to present both the methodological and epistemological reflections, as well as some results and recommendations regarding what could be called “Premodern Studies”. Indeed, while studying to fabric of Muslim alterities in the collective imaginaries of the Burgundian political elites of the 15th century and the connection of this fabric with the Burgundian political ideology, I have sought to understand the process of otherness in a more global context : the ongoing construction of a West European identity, which will soon weave relationships of colonization and racial hierarchy around the world, and the progressive othering of specific communities in relation to a situated reading of the world. More precisely, I propose to explain, based on the case study of the collective imaginaries of the Burgundian political elites, how the epistemology of the Cultural and Postcolonial Studies allow us to recognize what has so far been blind spots in the late medieval narrative sources (e.g., travel tales, romances, and chronicles): specific collective memory selections and constructions, exonyms to designate Muslim communities, the performativity of the discourse, etc. Furthermore, such an articulation between Medieval Studies and Cultural and Postcolonial Studies sheds light on the coloniality, even unconscious, of a large portion of the contemporary historiography on the Middle Ages. A close attention to its rhetoric quickly makes this clear. In other words, I aim to show, through my presentation based on this specific case study, how my doctoral dissertation contributes to remove the Middle Ages and its study from its presumed innocence

Untangling family bonds: natural disasters and EU emergency law

Climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity and complexity of natural disasters, understood as ‘calamitous events or series of events resulting in widespread loss of life, great human suffering and distress, mass displacement, or large-scale material or environmental damage, thereby seriously disrupting the functioning of society’. Yet, when measured against their growing humanitarian and economic relevance, legal scholarship’s attention to the body of EU rules and principles designed to prevent, mitigate, reduce and respond to natural disasters has been surprisingly scarce. Contributions examining the legal dimension of EU disaster response emerged largely in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty, focusing on aspects of EU competence or on the toolbox of instruments available to the EU to respond to ‘crisis’,‘threats’ or ‘global emergencies’. These contributions form part of a growing body of scholarship on EU emergency law, broadly defined as ‘the rules of primary and secondary EU law that serve to address sudden threats to the core values and structures of the Union and its Member States’. Natural disasters, however, seldom feature in these studies. In a typology that contrasts sudden emergencies with structural crisis, natural disasters fall between the conceptual cracks by emblematically embodying a phenomenon that can no longer be conceptualised as exceptional, nor can it be seen as endemic to the EU. Based on this premise, this paper examines the legal-conceptual construction of EU competence with respect to natural disasters in EU primary and secondary law and in the case law of the Court of Justice to determine whether natural disasters can, or should, retain their family ties to EU emergency law. The paper argues in the negative, sustaining that natural disaster can no longer be understood as temporary, extra-ordinary or exceptional events, to which emergency powers should be relegated. Ultimately, the paper calls for a constitutional re-imagination of EU powers with respect to natural disasters, one that is not primarily grounded on State sovereignty and EU supporting powers, and for a narrow understanding of EU emergency law

High-throughput calculations of spin Hall conductivity in non-magnetic 2D materials

Spin Hall effect (SHE) in two-dimensional (2D) materials is promising to effectively manipulate spin angular momentum and identify topological properties. In this work, we implemented an automated Wannierization with spin-orbit coupling on 426 non-magneticmonolayers including 210 metal and 216 insulators. Intrinsic spin Hall conductivity (SHC) has been calculated to find candidates exhibiting novel properties. We discover that Y2C2I2 has an unconventional SHE with canted spin due to low crystal symmetry, Ta4Se2 is a metallic monolayer with exceptionally high SHC, and the semi-metal Y2Br2 possesses efficient charge-to-spin conversion induced by anti-crossing in bands. Moreover, quantum spin Hall insulators are investigated for quantized SHC. The present work provides a highquality Wannier Hamiltonian database of 2D materials, and paves the way for the integration of 2D materials into high-performance and low-power-consumption spintronic devices

Philologie et grivoiserie à l'égyptienne : les termes bn.t / bn (ou bnbn)/ bnn

Comment l'iconographie musicale peut venir en aide à la lexicologie. How musical iconography can help lexicology

Organo-mineral interactions in permafrost environments affected by physical degradation

Permafrost soils are found at high latitudes and altitudes, and contain three times more carbon than in the atmosphere. As permafrost thaws, a portion of this carbon - still largely uncertain - is released in the form of greenhouse gases (GHG), resulting in a permafrost carbon-climate-feedback. This feedback still awaits to be integrated in global models of GHG emissions used by the IPCC, but is estimated as equivalent to the emissions from one additional large industrialized country. The uncertainties are partly attributable to the unknown contribution of the thawing of ice-rich permafrost, which manifests by physical degradation, named thermokarst terrains. Another source of uncertainty relates to the proportion of organic carbon (OC) that is linked to mineral surfaces or mineral elements, as mineral-interacting OC. These stabilization mechanisms are presumed to render the corresponding OC fraction less accessible to decomposition and emissions as GHGs. This thesis investigates the abundance, nature and control of mineral-OC interactions in permafrost soils and sediments affected by thermokarst disturbances. Chemical stabilization mechanisms have been shown to stabilize on average 31 ± 12% of total OC, and this pool of mineral-interacting OC is preserved in materials exported by the thermo-erosion process. We also show that historical permafrost thaw dynamics have a decisive influence on the concentration and proportion of mineral-interacting OC in permafrost environments. Finally, we have shown that the formation of lowland thermokarst landscapes has progressed locally five times faster in recent years than in the last few decades, with an expected release of mineral-bound OC. Such findings demonstrate the urgent need to integrate OC-mineral interactions into global ecosystem carbon balance models. This requires establishing links between concentrations and proportions of mineral-interacting OC and GHG emissions.(AGRO - Sciences agronomiques et ingénierie biologique) -- UCL, 202

Libre circulation des personnes dans l'Union européenne

Dans le monde du sport, en particulier du football, la Cour de justice poursuit l'encadrement des règles de transfert (FIFA), mais aussi d'un certain ordre public européen de la liberté de la presse (Le Monde) L'arrêt Mirin renforce la reconnaissance des diversités, en l'espèce d'une personne transgenre Dans les arrêts sur la perte de la nationalité, la Cour admet largement les motifs nationaux de lutte contre la bipatridie, tout en imposant un contrôle des effets de cette perte de nationalité sur la citoyenneté européenne Dans toutes ces affaires, c'est le principe de proportionnalité qui domine comme étalon de mesure des dispositions qui pourraient constituer des entraves à la liberté de circulation ou aux droits des citoyen

Comparing Differentiable and Dynamic Ray Tracing: Introducing the Multipath Lifetime Map

With the increasing presence of dynamic scenarios, such as Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications, radio propagation modeling tools must adapt to the rapidly changing nature of the radio channel. Recently, both Differentiable and Dynamic Ray Tracing frameworks have emerged to address these challenges. However, there is often confusion about how these approaches differ and which one should be used in specific contexts. In this paper, we provide an overview of these two techniques and a comparative analysis against two state-of-the-art tools: 3DSCAT from UniBo and Sionna from NVIDIA. To provide a more precise characterization of the scope of these methods, we introduce a novel simulation-based metric, the Multipath Lifetime Map, which enables the evaluation of spatial and temporal coherence in radio channels only based on the geometrical description of the environment. Finally, our metrics are evaluated on a classic urban street canyon scenario, yielding similar results to those obtained from measurement campaigns

Deportationen im Perserreich in teispidisch-achaimenidischer Zeit

Review of the monograph by Chiara Matarese, Deportationen im Perserreich in teispidisch-achaimenidischer Zeit, 2021