Exosome membrane bound TNF-receptor for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that causes painful inflammation of the synovium of the patient’s joints. However, current treatments for RA have a variety of drawbacks. They often are ineffective, expensive, invasive, risky, cause an immune response, and/ or only provide short term relief. Thus, we developed a new treatment for preventing inflammation: TNF-receptors anchored onto exosome surfaces. Exosomes are nanovesicles that are naturally secreted by most of the cells in our bodies. The many benefits of using exosomes include non-immunogenicity, natural stability in the body, and non-invasiveness. We have demonstrated that exosome membrane bound TNF-receptors have the ability to prevent inflammation in mammalian cells. The success of this project could lead to a clinically effective treatment of rheumatoid arthritis as well as other inflammatory diseases by opening the doors to further research and development of exosomal therapies

Requirements modelling and formal analysis using graph operations

The increasing complexity of enterprise systems requires a more advanced analysis of the representation of services expected than is currently possible. Consequently, the specification stage, which could be facilitated by formal verification, becomes very important to the system life-cycle. This paper presents a formal modelling approach, which may be used in order to better represent the reality of the system and to verify the awaited or existing system’s properties, taking into account the environmental characteristics. For that, we firstly propose a formalization process based upon properties specification, and secondly we use Conceptual Graphs operations to develop reasoning mechanisms of verifying requirements statements. The graphic visualization of these reasoning enables us to correctly capture the system specifications by making it easier to determine if desired properties hold. It is applied to the field of Enterprise modelling

A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

Requirements to Testing of Power System Services Provided by DER Units

The present report forms the Project Deliverable ‘D 2.2’ of the DERlab NoE project, supported by the EC under Contract No. SES6-CT-518299 NoE DERlab. The present document discuss the power system services that may be provided from DER units and the related methods to test the services actually provided, both at component level and at system level