Quality Control Platform for the Standardization of a Regenerative Medicine Product

Adipose tissue is an attractive source of stem cells due to its wide availability. They contribute to the stromal vascular fraction (SVF), which is composed of pre-adipocytes, tissue-progenitors, and pericytes, among others. Because its direct use in medical applications is increasing worldwide, new quality control systems are required. We investigated the ability of the Non-Equilibrium Earth Gravity Assisted Dynamic Fractionation (NEEGA-DF) method to analyze and separate cells based solely on their physical characteristics, resulting in a fingerprint of the biological sample. Adipose tissue was enzymatically digested, and the SVF was analyzed by NEEGA-DF. Based on the fractogram (the UV signal of eluting cells versus time of analysis) the collection time was set to sort alive cells. The collected cells (F-SVF) were analyzed for their phenotype, immunomodulation ability, and differentiation potential. The SVF profile showed reproducibility, and the alive cells were collected. The F-SVF showed intact adhesion phenotype, proliferation, and differentiation potential. The methodology allowed enrichment of the mesenchymal component with a higher expression of mesenchymal markers and depletion of debris, RBCs, and an extracellular matrix still present in the digestive product. Moreover, cells eluting in the last minutes showed higher circularity and lower area, proving the principles of enrichment of a more homogenous cell population with better characteristics. We proved the NEEGA-DF method is a "gentle" cell sorter that purifies primary cells obtained by enzymatic digestion and does not alter any stem cell function

Being active with a total hip or knee prosthesis: a systematic review into physical activity and sports recommendations and interventions to improve physical activity behavior

Objectives Regular physical activity (PA) is considered important after total hip and knee arthroplasty (THA/TKA). Objective was to systematically assess literature on recommendations given by healthcare professionals to persons after THA and TKA and to provide an overview of existing interventions to stimulate PA and sports participation. Methods A systematic review with a narrative synthesis including articles published between January 1995 and January 2021 reporting on recommendations and interventions. The PubMed, Embase, CINAHL and PsycInfo databases were systematically searched for original articles reporting on physical activity and sports recommendations given by healthcare professionals to persons after THA and TKA, and articles reporting on interventions/programs to stimulate a physically active lifestyle after rehabilitation or explicitly defined as part of the rehabilitation. Methodological quality was assessed with the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT). The review was registered in Prospero (PROSPERO:CRD42020178556). Results Twenty-one articles reported on recommendations. Low-impact activities were allowed. Contact sports, most ball sports, and martial arts were not recommended. One study informed on whether health-enhancing PA recommendations were used to stimulate persons to become physically active. No studies included recommendations on sedentary behavior. Eleven studies reported on interventions. Interventions used guidance from a coach/physiotherapist; feedback on PA behavior from technology; and face-to-face, education, goal-setting, financial incentives and coaching/financial incentives combined, of which feedback and education seem to be most effective. For methodological quality, 18 out of 21 (86%) articles about recommendations and 7 out of 11 (64%) articles about interventions scored yes on more than half of the MMAT questions (0-5 score). Conclusion There is general agreement on what kind of sports activities can be recommended by healthcare professionals like orthopedic surgeons and physiotherapists. No attention is given to amount of PA. The same is true for limiting sedentary behavior. The number of interventions is limited and diverse, so no conclusions can be drawn. Interventions including provision of feedback about PA, seem to be effective and feasible

Correction to: Being active with a total hip or knee prosthesis: a systematic review into physical activity and sports recommendations and interventions to improve physical activity behavior

Objectives: Regular physical activity (PA) is considered important after total hip and knee arthroplasty (THA/TKA). Objective was to systematically assess literature on recommendations given by healthcare professionals to persons after THA and TKA and to provide an overview of existing interventions to stimulate PA and sports participation. Methods: A systematic review with a narrative synthesis including articles published between January 1995 and January 2021 reporting on recommendations and interventions. The PubMed, Embase, CINAHL and PsycInfo databases were systematically searched for original articles reporting on physical activity and sports recommendations given by healthcare professionals to persons after THA and TKA, and articles reporting on interventions/programs to stimulate a physically active lifestyle after rehabilitation or explicitly defined as part of the rehabilitation. Methodological quality was assessed with the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT). The review was registered in Prospero (PROSPERO:CRD42020178556). Results: Twenty-one articles reported on recommendations. Low-impact activities were allowed. Contact sports, most ball sports, and martial arts were not recommended. One study informed on whether health-enhancing PA recommendations were used to stimulate persons to become physically active. No studies included recommendations on sedentary behavior. Eleven studies reported on interventions. Interventions used guidance from a coach/physiotherapist; feedback on PA behavior from technology; and face-to-face, education, goal-setting, financial incentives and coaching/financial incentives combined, of which feedback and education seem to be most effective. For methodological quality, 18 out of 21 (86%) articles about recommendations and 7 out of 11 (64%) articles about interventions scored yes on more than half of the MMAT questions (0–5 score). Conclusion: There is general agreement on what kind of sports activities can be recommended by healthcare professionals like orthopedic surgeons and physiotherapists. No attention is given to amount of PA. The same is true for limiting sedentary behavior. The number of interventions is limited and diverse, so no conclusions can be drawn. Interventions including provision of feedback about PA, seem to be effective and feasible

Amount and type of physical activity and sports from one year forward after hip or knee arthroplasty—A systematic review

Introduction After rehabilitation following total hip or knee arthroplasty (THA/TKA), patients are advised to participate in physical activity (PA) and sports. However, profound insight into whether people adopt a physically active lifestyle is lacking. Aim is to gain insight into the performed amount and type of PA (including sports) and time spent sedentarily by persons after THA/ TKA. Methods A systematic review (PROSPERO: CRD42020178556). Pubmed, Cinahl, EMBASE and PsycInfo were systematically searched for articles reporting on amount of PA, and on the kind of activities performed between January 1995-January 2021. Quality of the articles was assessed with the adapted tool from Borghouts et al. Results The search retrieved 5029 articles, leading to inclusion of 125 articles reporting data of 123 groups; 53 articles reported on subjects post-THA, 16 on post-hip-resurfacing arthroplasty, 40 on post-TKA, 15 on post-unicompartimental knee arthroplasty and 12 on a mix of arthroplasty types. With respect to quality assessment, 14 articles (11%) met three or fewer criteria, 29 (24%) met four, 32 (26%) met five, 42 (34%) met six, and 6 (5%) met seven out of the eight criteria. PA levels were comparable for THA and TKA, showing a low to moderately active population. Time spent was mostly of low intensity. Roughly 50% of -subjects met health-enhancing PA guidelines. They spent the largest part of their day sedentarily. Sports participation was relatively high (rates above 70%). Most participation was in low-impact sports at a recreational level. Roughly speaking, participants were engaged in sports 3 hours/week, consisting of about three 1-hour sessions. Conclusion Activity levels seem to be low; less than half of them seemed to perform the advised amount of PA following health-enhancing guidelines Sports participation levels were high. However, many articles were unclear about the definition of sports participation, which could have led to overestimation

The Speed of Sound in Methane under Conditions of the Thermal Boundary Layer of Uranus

We present the first direct observations of acoustic waves in warm dense matter. We analyze wavenumber- and energy-resolved X-ray spectra taken from warm dense methane created by laser-heating a cryogenic liquid jet. X-ray diffraction and inelastic free electron scattering yield sample conditions of 0.3$\pm$0.1 eV and 0.8$\pm$0.1 g/cm$^3$, corresponding to a pressure of $\sim$13 GPa and matching the conditions predicted in the thermal boundary layer between the inner and outer envelope of Uranus. Inelastic X-ray scattering was used to observe the collective oscillations of the ions. With a highly improved energy resolution of $\sim$50 meV, we could clearly distinguish the Brillouin peaks from the quasi-elastic Rayleigh feature. Data at different wavenumbers were used to obtain a sound speed of 5.9$\pm$0.5 km/s, which enabled us to validate the use of Birch's law in this new parameter regime.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures with supplementary informatio

Slow dynamics in colloids and network glasses close to the structural arrest: the Stress-relaxation as a root to equilibrium

Microscopically disordered materials are at the core of an increasing number of new material technologies, but crucial limitations in their applications come from the physical aging of their properties and the extreme sensitivity on the system's history, which stem from the their intrinsically out of equilibrium nature. A clear understanding of the aging phenomenon, as well as the effects of the release of internal stresses acting at different length-scales, are still lacking. In this Thesis the slow dynamics of disordered systems is investigated at different length-scales ranging from the micrometre length-scale probed in optical experiments to length-scales of few angstroms probed in wide angle X-ray experiments. The time evolution of the probed out of equilibrium dynamics is thoroughly studied in different glasses exploiting the multi speckle photon correlation technique with different sources. The investigated materials are a set of strong glass-formers (materials that can be found in a wide variety of common glassware) and colloidal suspensions at high volume fractions in an arrested state. The latter class of materials are known as soft glasses and in recent years they are earning great interest and can be found in a lot of industrial products (e.g. wall paint, ink, chocolate) or in production processes (e.g. ceramics). Despite the differences between the probed systems and their production protocols, it is here shown that in all the studied materials the microscopic dynamics displays common trends and that it is strongly connected to the relaxation of the stresses that have remained trapped in these systems after their production

L'organizzazione della rete distributiva in un contesto di global sourcing: l'approccio "merge in transit"

Il processo evolutivo del mondo dei trasporti ha riscontrato negli ultimi anni una rapida accelerazione, dovuta all’incremento degli scambi commerciali nelle supply chain globali, dando vita a nuove soluzioni per la gestione dei trasporti su scala mondiale. Fra queste, il presente lavoro analizza il Merge in Transit, che prevede la consegna a un medesimo cliente in un’unica soluzione dell’insieme degli articoli richiesti, provenienti da origini diverse,pianificando le spedizioni affinché giungano al punto di merge nello stesso intorno di tempo, garantendo il rispetto dell’appuntamento presso tale punto. Le applicazioni di tale tecnica sono svariate,ed estendibili in numerosi settori industriali,produttivi e commerciali. Nell’articolo si presenta uno studio degli ambiti applicativi e dei requisiti organizzativi di questa nuova tecnica. Viene inoltre riportato un caso di studio relativo a un’azienda manifatturiera italiana che ha applicato il merge in transit, in cui si evidenziano i benefici economici e organizzativi derivanti dalla sua corretta implementazione

Influence of the threshold settings of photon counting detectors on the observed speckle contrast in coherent scattering experiments

Speckle-based experiments, in particular X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS), are among the ones that benefit most from the development of next generation light sources. The key quantity that determines whether or not it will be possible to perform an XPCS experiment is the speckle contrast β, which measures the visibility of the speckle pattern. The speckle contrast is influenced by geometrical conditions and light-source properties [1], and recently it has been noticed that artifacts in photon-counting detectors strongly interfere with the determination of the real value of β when the number of detected photons per frame is extremely low [2]. Here we report how the threshold setting of a photon counting detector, an EIGER X 4M, affects the detected contrast even at non extreme illumination conditions (0.01-0.05 photons/pixel/second). We found that by increasing the threshold value, not only leads to the expected drop in detected intensity, but also to a significant increase in the value of β. Additionally we will present an in-operando situation in which the higher threshold helps critically to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the measured scattering pattern resulting in a five-fold increment of the speckle contrast

X-rays induced atomic dynamics in a lithium-borate glass

The continuous development of synchrotron-based experimental techniques in the X-ray range provides new possibilities to probe the structure and the dynamics of bulk materials down to inter-atomic distances. However, the interaction of intense X-ray beams with matter can also induce changes in the structure and dynamics of materials. A reversible and non-destructive beam induced dynamics has recently been observed in X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy experiments in some oxide glasses at sufficiently low absorbed doses, and is here investigated in a (Li2O)0.5(B2O3)0.5 glass. The characteristic time of this induced dynamics is inversely proportional to the intensity of the X-ray beam, with a coefficient that depends on the chemical composition and local structure of the probed glass, making it a potentially new tool to investigate fundamental properties of a large class of disordered systems. While the exact mechanisms behind this phenomenon are yet to be elucidated, we report here on the measurement of the exchanged wave-vector (and thus length-scale) dependence of the characteristic time of this induced dynamics, and show that it follows the same power-law observed in vitreous silica. This supports the idea that a unique explanation for this effect in different oxide glasses should be looked fo