Analytical technology for cleaning verification and analysis of drug purity in pharmaceutical production.

Production of pharmaceuticals is a complex process which goes beyond the synthetic reactions undertaken to produce the final drug product. In multi purpose manufacturing facilities the equipment used in the processes must be proven to be sufficiently free of residue from the previous compound so that safe manufacture of the next compound can commence. Cross contamination can pose serious health risks so cleaning verification is a process of extreme importance. Pharmaceutical products may contain impurities that originate from the synthetic stages of production, the starting materials or from in situ reactions taking place in the final drug. Some of these impurities may be genotoxic. Genotoxic impurities are a class of impurities for which awareness is currently growing in the pharmaceutical industry. Traditional analytical chemistry methods such as HPLC are currently employed for the detection and quantification of cleaning residues and genotoxic impurities. These methods can be extremely time consuming. The aims of this project are to investigate swab sampling in cleaning verification, to develop alternative analytical methods which speed up and enhance knowledge of the cleaning verification process and to begin the development of an assay system for commonly occurring genotoxic impurities

Boundary breathers in the sinh-Gordon model

We present an investigation of the boundary breather states of the sinh-Gordon model restricted to a half-line. The classical boundary breathers are presented for a two parameter family of integrable boundary conditions. Restricting to the case of boundary conditions which preserve the \phi --> -\phi symmetry of the bulk theory, the energy spectrum of the boundary states is computed in two ways: firstly, by using the bootstrap technique and subsequently, by using a WKB approximation. Requiring that the two descriptions of the spectrum agree with each other allows a determination of the relationship between the boundary parameter, the bulk coupling constant, and the parameter appearing in the reflection factor derived by Ghoshal to describe the scattering of the sinh-Gordon particle from the boundary.Comment: 16 pages amslate

Using handheld pocket computers in a wireless telemedicine system

Objectives: To see if senior emergency nurse practitioners can provide support to inexperienced ones in a Minor Injuries Unit by using a wireless LAN system of telemedicine transmitting images to a PDA when they were on duty. In addition, whether such a system could be sufficiently accurate to make clinical diagnoses with a high level of diagnostic confidence. This would permit an overall lower grade of nurse to be employed to manage most of the cases as they arrive with a proportionate lowering of costs. Methods: The wireless LAN equipment could roam in the Minor Injuries Unit and the experienced emergency Nurse practitioners could be at home, shopping or even at a considerable distance from the centre. Thirty pictorial images of patients who had been sent to the Review Clinic were transmitted to a PDA various distances of one to sixteen miles from the centre. Two senior emergency nurse practitioners viewed the images and opined on the diagnosis, their degree of confidence in the diagnosis and their opinion of the quality of the image. Results: the images of patients were sharp, clear, and of diagnostic quality. The image quality was only uncertain, as was the level of confidence of the diagnosis if the patient was very dark skinned. Conclusions: The wireless LAN system works with a remote PDA in this clinical situation. However there are question marks over the availability of enough experienced emergency nurse practitioners to staff a service that provides senior cover for longer parts of the day and at weekends

Antarctic Meteorites: A Statistical Look at a Uniquely Valuable Resource

As of the end of the 2018-19 field season, the U.S. Antarctic meteorite program has surpassed 23,000 meteorites collected. The U.S. collection is valuable in that it is classified in its entirety. The systematic methods employed to collect the meteorites have provided meteorites of more than 40 types, many of which are the first of their type ever recognized. One of the early drivers for consistent and methodical characterization of the entire U.S. Antarctic collection was to allow statistical comparisons. Early statistical assessments of the U.S. Antarctic collection examined mass distributions and the relative frequency of meteorite types as well as comparisons to a defined set of modern falls. Using these statistics argued that the flux of H chondrites changed over time used model size distributions to deconstruct the contribution of wind movement, meteorite supply and search losses to the Antarctic collection. Mass-based statistics and size distribution comparisons were examined by investigated various aspects of the statistics, including comparison with modern falls/Saharan finds. Also discuss geospatial statistics provides a comprehensive overview of the statistics of the Antarctic collections for the first 35 seasons of U.S. collection by ANSMET. Here we build upon that assessment and that from

Sine-Gordon quantum field theory on the half-line with quantum boundary degrees of freedom

The sine-Gordon model on the half-line with a dynamical boundary introduced by Delius and one of the authors is considered at quantum level. Classical boundary conditions associated with classical integrability are shown to be preserved at quantum level too. Non-local conserved charges are constructed explicitly in terms of the field and boundary operators. We solve the intertwining equation associated with a certain coideal subalgebra of $U_q(\hat{sl_2})$ generated by these non-local charges. The corresponding solution is shown to satisfy quantum boundary Yang-Baxter equations. Up to an exact relation between the quantization length of the boundary quantum mechanical system and the sine-Gordon coupling constant, we conjecture the soliton/antisoliton reflection matrix and boundstates reflection matrices. The structure of the boundary state is then considered, and shown to be divided in two sectors. Also, depending on the sine-Gordon coupling constant a finite set of boundary bound states are identified. Taking the analytic continuation of the coupling, the corresponding boundary sinh-Gordon model is briefly discussed. In particular, the particle reflection factor enjoys weak-strong coupling duality.Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX file with amssymb, v2: references added, Comments added, typos corrected. To appear in Nucl.Phys.

A review of microfabricated electrochemical biosensors for DNA detection

This review article presents an overview of recent work on electrochemical biosensors developed using microfabrication processes, particularly sensors used to achieve sensitive and specific detection of DNA sequences. Such devices are important as they lend themselves to miniaturisation, reproducible mass-manufacture, and integration with other previously existing technologies and production methods. The review describes the current state of these biosensors, novel methods used to produce them or enhance their sensing properties, and pathways to deployment of a complete point-of-care biosensing system in a clinical setting

Comparison of Maximal and Supramaximal Verification Tests

Please view abstract in the attached PDF file

Multisymplectic approach to integrable defects in the sine-Gordon model

Ideas from the theory of multisymplectic systems, introduced recently in integrable systems by the author and Kundu to discuss Liouville integrability in classical field theories with a defect, are applied to the sine-Gordon model. The key ingredient is the introduction of a second Poisson bracket in the theory that allows for a Hamiltonian description of the model that is completely equivalent to the standard one, in the absence of a defect. In the presence of a defect described by frozen Bäcklund transformations, our approach based on the new bracket unifies the various tools used so far to attack the problem. It also gets rid of the known issues related to the evaluation of the Poisson brackets of the defect matrix which involve fields at coinciding space point (the location of the defect). The original Lagrangian approach also finds a nice reinterpretation in terms of the canonical transformation representing the defect conditions

Supersymmetric D-brane Bound States with B-field and Higher Dimensional Instantons on Noncommutative Geometry

We classify supersymmetric D0-Dp bound states with a non-zero B-field by considering T-dualities of intersecting branes at angles. Especially, we find that the D0-D8 system with the B-field preserves 1/16, 1/8 and 3/16 of supercharges if the B-field satisfies the ``(anti-)self-dual'' condition in dimension eight. The D0-branes in this system are described by eight dimensional instantons on non-commutative R^8. We also discuss the extended ADHM construction of the eight-dimensional instantons and its deformation by the B-field. The modified ADHM equations admit a sort of the `fuzzy sphere' (embeddings of SU(2)) solution.Comment: 20 pages, LaTeX file, typos corrected and references adde