The Challenge of Co-Religionist Commerce

This Article addresses the rise of co-religionist commerce in the United States—that is, the explosion of commercial dealings that take place between co-religionists who intend their transactions to achieve both commercial and religious objectives. To remain viable, coreligionist commerce requires all the legal support necessary to sustain all other commercial relationships. Contracts must be enforced, parties must be protected against torts, and disputes must be reliably adjudicated. Under current constitutional doctrine, co-religionist commercial agreements must be translated into secular terminology if they are to be judicially enforced. But many religious goods and services cannot be accurately translated without religious terms and structures. To address this translation problem, courts could make use of contextual tools of contract interpretation, thereby providing the necessary evidence to give meaning to co-religionist commercial agreements. However, contextual approaches to co-religionist commerce have been undermined by two current legal trends—one in constitutional law, the other in commercial law. The first is New Formalism, which discourages courts from looking to customary norms and relational principles to interpret commercial instruments. The second is what we call Establishment Clause Creep, which describes a growing judicial reticence to adjudicate disputes situated within a religious context. Together, these two legal developments prevent courts from using context to interpret and enforce co-religionist commercial agreements. This Article proposes that courts preserve co-religionist commerce with a limited embrace of contextualism. A thorough inquiry into context, which is discouraged by both New Formalist and many Establishment Clause doctrines, would allow courts to surmise parties\u27 intents and distinguish commercial from religious substance. Empowering the intent of co-religionist parties and limiting the doctrinal developments that threaten to undermine co-religionist commerce can secure marketplace dealings without intruding upon personal faith

GraphBinMatch: Graph-based Similarity Learning for Cross-Language Binary and Source Code Matching

Matching binary to source code and vice versa has various applications in different fields, such as computer security, software engineering, and reverse engineering. Even though there exist methods that try to match source code with binary code to accelerate the reverse engineering process, most of them are designed to focus on one programming language. However, in real life, programs are developed using different programming languages depending on their requirements. Thus, cross-language binary-to-source code matching has recently gained more attention. Nonetheless, the existing approaches still struggle to have precise predictions due to the inherent difficulties when the problem of matching binary code and source code needs to be addressed across programming languages. In this paper, we address the problem of cross-language binary source code matching. We propose GraphBinMatch, an approach based on a graph neural network that learns the similarity between binary and source codes. We evaluate GraphBinMatch on several tasks, such as cross-language binary-to-source code matching and cross-language source-to-source matching. We also evaluate our approach performance on single-language binary-to-source code matching. Experimental results show that GraphBinMatch outperforms state-of-the-art significantly, with improvements as high as 15% over the F1 score

Engineering biomimetic formulations for drug and gene delivery

Nanotechnology-based solutions have gained burgeoning attention in medical research, as compared with conventional therapeutic modalities, they offer advantages in efficacy, safety, and scalability. Researchers have been developing fluidic systems for nanoformulations over recent decades. Despite promising results, the clinical potential of the current nanosystems is still limited by insufficient cargo (drug and gene) loading, low production, high toxicity, low colloidal stability, unsatisfied bioavailability, and batch-to-batch variation. Flash-based self-assembly is a recently developed technology that can manufacture nanoformulations in facile, consistent, reproducible, and scalable manners. Due to the turbulent and dynamic flow generated in the mixing chamber, biomaterials self-assemble into uniform nanoparticles (NPs) through precipitation or complexation. We modified and manufactured a number of flash-based systems and evaluated their dynamic mixing profiles through simulation and empirical testing for polyplex formation and nanoparticle coating, as the dynamic fluidic control is the key for biomaterial complexation and nanoparticle coating, which provides better nanoparticle colloidal stability. In Chapter 2, we formulated polyplexes and lipid-coated NPs with controllable size and enhanced colloidal stability by exploiting the dynamic mixing of the flash-based system. Bio-inspired nanosystems with engineered functions have been advancing the field of nanomedicine. Incorporating bio-inspired components can provide nanosystems with productive ways of interacting with their surroundings by diminishing nonspecific interactions or enhancing specific targeting. Membranes from different cell types, and even organisms, can be employed and merged to meet specific goals. We derived cell membranes from distinctive mammalian cell lines to improve nanosystems with smart biological interactions, such as preserving neo-antigens or enhancing specific targeting. Another potent property of utilizing cell membranes is that they provide NPs with colloidal stability. Recent studies have reported the use of cell membrane coating onto NPs in drug delivery, imaging, phototherapies, and detoxification. The derived components from the original cell source bestow the NPs with their inherent functionality without additional complicated modulation. Cell membrane coating is a top-down technique that directly derives and harnesses the natural components, evading the technical and procedural challenges in bottom-up fabrication. However, current membrane coating techniques have problems of batch-to-batch variation and low production yield, which limits its potential for clinical translation. Taking advantage of flash-based self-assembly, we standardized and scaled up the cell membrane-coating process, which is difficult to achieve in bulk mixing approaches. The optimization of cell membrane coating was explored using various simulations. The time and cost for experimental design and optimization were reduced considerably. Cell membranes derived from tumor cells contain a rich source of tumor antigens. With the potential of cell membrane coating using flash-based self-assembly, we applied the produced cell-membrane-coated mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSN) as a biomimetic nanovaccine for cancer immunotherapy in Chapter 3. Oral delivery of drugs and genes is a relatively convenient, patient-friendly, and safe approach. Targeted and controlled oral delivery of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) of biomimetic nanocarriers offers significant advantages in efficacy and safety compared to conventional modalities. Besides mammalian cells, the unique functionalities of other prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell types, such as bacterium and yeasts, were exploited for macromolecule delivery. Baker’s yeast, a common yeast strain closely associated with food preparation, contains valuable polysaccharides that were reported to specifically bind to the dectin-1 receptors on the specialized intestinal epithelial cells and monocytes. Exploiting the yeast’s cell wall is a biomimetic strategy when designing an oral carrier for targeted oral drug and gene delivery. We demonstrated that the specific recognition between the microfold cells (M-cells) of the small intestine and the polysaccharides on the yeast cell wall enhances the transport of yeast-based formulations across the gut epithelium and into the lymphatic tissues in chapter 4. Utilizing the micron-sized yeast capsule or decorating a nanoparticle surface with processed yeast cell wall fragments, therapeutics were efficiently delivered to the target site through the oral path. The yeast-based formulations are biomimetic systems for targeted oral delivery of therapeutics. Taken together, the goal of this thesis is to close the gap between laboratory research and clinical translation by exploring the versatility and robustness of the developed flash technology, exploiting flash-based self-assembly for scalable production of the lipid and cell-membrane-coated nanosystems, and developing a relatively safe yeast-based drug and gene delivery platform