Healthcare Supply Chain Resilience Investment Strategy Analysis Based on Evolutionary Game

Healthcare is considered one of the necessities for sustaining life. However, frequent emergencies raise the risk of supply chain disruption, seriously threatening people’s lives and health security. Therefore, building a resilient healthcare supply chain is an important initiative to manage the healthcare crisis effectively. Based on the secondary supply chain formed by medical supply manufacturers and retailers, this paper constructs an evolution game model of resilience investment decisions under the non-disruption and disruption symmetry scenarios of the supply chain and analyzes the stabilization strategies employed by both parties based on their asymmetry strategy choices. Subsequently, the numerical simulation is used to analyze the impact of various parameters on the evolutionary results and their evolutionary trends. The results of the study show that additional benefits from resilience investment, potential costs, disruption losses, market encroachment revenue, “free-rider” benefits, additional benefit increase coefficient, resilience investment reduction coefficient, disruption loss reduction coefficient, additional unit cost reduction coefficient, and market encroachment revenue coefficient all influence the resilience investment decisions. Finally, based on the simulation results, specific recommendations are formulated to improve the resilience of the healthcare supply chain

Encapsulation of Hydrophilic and Lipophilic Compounds in Nanosomes Produced with a Supercritical Based Process

Liposomes are created when phospholipids self-assemble in an aqueous medium creating spherical closed structures. These vesicles can be loaded with hydrophilic active principles (AP) into the aqueous inner core or with lipophilic compounds in the lipidic double layer. In this work a new supercritical based process for the one-step continuous production of nanosomes is proposed for the encapsulation of hydrophilic and lipophilic compounds. This process is called Supercritical Assisted Liposome Formation (SuperLip). The innovation of this process consists in the inversion of the traditional phases of production of liposomes: water droplets are created by a spray atomization in a high pressure vessel, and then a double layer of phospholipids fast surrounds them. A systematic study on liposome size, morphology, encapsulation efficiency has been performed for several different hydrophilic AP (ampicillin, ofloxacin, bovine serum albumin, fluorescein, eugenol and theophylline). Some operative parameters were also optimized to achieve the production of nanometric liposomes with high encapsulation efficiencies. Operating in this way nanometric and monodispersed liposome suspensions were produced with EE up to 99%. To complete the study, other lipidic compounds were entrapped in the double lipidic layer, obtaining high entrapment efficiencies (TE), also in this case, up to 84.9%