Maintenance service logistics

Capital goods, such as manufacturing equipment, trains, and Industrial printers, are used in the primary processes of their users. Their availability is of key importance. To achieve high availability, maintenance is required throughout their long life cycles. Many different resources such as spare parts, service engineers and tools, are necessary to perform maintenance. In some cases, e.g. for trains, also maintenance facilities are required. Maintenance service logistics encompasses all processes that ensure that the resources required for maintenance are at the right place at the right time. In a broader sense, it also includes maintenance planning and design-for-maintenance. We first discuss capital goods and the requirements that their users have, which leads us to basic maintenance principles and the structure of typical service supply chains. Next, various relevant decisions and supporting theories and models are discussed. Finally, we discuss the latest developments within maintenance service logistics

Breast cancer adaptive resistance: HER2 and cancer stem cell repopulation in a heterogeneous tumor society.

PurposeThe lethal effects of cancer are associated with the enhanced tumor aggressiveness in recurrent and metastatic lesions that show resistant phenotype to anti-cancer therapy, a major barrier to improving overall survival of cancer patients. The presence of heterogeneous populations of cancer cells within a specific tumor including the tumor-initiating cells or so-called cancer stem cells (CSCs) has linked the acquired resistance (AR, or adaptive resistance). Herein, we discuss the CSC-mediated tumor repopulation in AR of breast cancer in this review.MethodsWe emphasize a dynamic feature of gene induction in tumor cells that undergo long-term treatment, and describe a specific HER2-NF-κB-HER2 pro-survival pathway that can be initiated in breast CSCs upon radiation therapy.ResultsElucidation of HER2-induced pro-survival networks, specifically the force driving tumor repopulation due to radioresistant CSCs during anticancer therapies, will have a significant impact on the generation of new diagnostic and therapeutic targets to control of recurrent and metastatic breast tumors

Multiple Dynamics in Tumor Microenvironment Under Radiotherapy.

The tumor microenvironment (TME) is an evolutionally low-level and embryonically featured tissue comprising heterogenic populations of malignant and stromal cells as well as noncellular components. Under radiotherapy (RT), the major modality for the treatment of malignant diseases [1], TME shows an adaptive response in multiple aspects that affect the efficacy of RT. With the potential clinical benefits, interests in RT combined with immunotherapy (IT) are intensified with a large scale of clinical trials underway for an array of cancer types. A better understanding of the multiple molecular aspects, especially the cross talks of RT-mediated energy reprogramming and immunoregulation in the irradiated TME (ITME), will be necessary for further enhancing the benefit of RT-IT modality. Coming studies should further reveal more mechanistic insights of radiation-induced instant or permanent consequence in tumor and stromal cells. Results from these studies will help to identify critical molecular pathways including cancer stem cell repopulation, metabolic rewiring, and specific communication between radioresistant cancer cells and the infiltrated immune active lymphocytes. In this chapter, we will focus on the following aspects: radiation-repopulated cancer stem cells (CSCs), hypoxia and re-oxygenation, reprogramming metabolism, and radiation-induced immune regulation, in which we summarize the current literature to illustrate an integrated image of the ITME. We hope that the contents in this chapter will be informative for physicians and translational researchers in cancer radiotherapy or immunotherapy