Vaccine Adjuvant Delivery Systems Constructed Using Biocompatible Nanoparticles Formed through Self-Assembly of Small Molecules

Subunit vaccines are playing a critical role in controlling numerous diseases and attracting more and more research interests due to their numerous advantages over conventional whole microbe-based vaccines. However, subunit vaccines are weak immunogens and thus have limited capacity in eliciting the humoral and cellular immunity against pathogens. Recently, nanoparticles (NPs) formed with certain small molecules through self-assembly have been employed as an effective carrier for subunit vaccines to play roles of adjuvant, delivery and stabilization of antigens, thus engendering a vaccine adjuvant-delivery system (VADS), which shows promises to overcome the hurdles in developing subunit vaccines. In particular, the small molecule-self-assembled NPs as a VADS can not only deliver vaccine ingredients to immune cells but also influence the immunoresponse toward a Th1 (type 1 T helper cell) and Th2 balanced pathway to establish both humoral and cellular immunity. This chapter describes the innovative VADSs based on the small molecule-self-assembled NPs, such as metal NPs (mNPs), emulsions, liposomes, and ISCOMs, which are elaborately designed for the development of subunit vaccines

Vaccines Developed for Cancer Immunotherapy

Vaccines have been successfully used for prophylaxis of infectious diseases for a long time and in the last decades have inspired researchers to make products with similar immunological mechanisms for cancer immunotherapy, which has been developed rapidly into clinical applications and has shown remarkable therapeutic efficacy, as exemplified by chimeric Ag receptor T cell (CAR-T cell) and immune checkpoint inhibitor-based therapies which can efficiently strengthen the body’s immune system to fight against cancer, but they are also expensive. Therefore, encouraged by recent success of cancer immunotherapy, scientists are actively developing the low-cost tumor Ag-based vaccines, which, however, usually exhibit weak immunostimulating effects and, therefore, are often formulated with nanoparticulate carriers to form a vaccine adjuvant-delivery system (VADS), which can not only enhance the efficacy but also mitigate the off-target toxicity associated with conventional anticancer vaccines. These nanoparticulate carrier-based VADSs have demonstrated multiple functions, such as targetedly triggering Ag-presenting cells, reeducating tumor-associated macrophages (TAM) to function as tumor suppressor agent, and eliciting robust cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) to kill tumor cells. This chapter introduces multifunctional VADS that have been engineered with nanoparticulate carriers, including polymeric-, lipid-, metallic-, and cell-based nanoparticles, and used as an alternative to the existent tools for cancer immunotherapy

Shift invariant sparse coding ensemble and its application in rolling bearing fault diagnosis

This paper proposes an automatic diagnostic scheme without manual feature extraction or signal pre-processing. It directly handles the original data from sensors and determines the condition of the rolling bearing. With proper application of the new technique of shift invariant sparse coding (SISC), it is much easier to recognize the fault. Yet, this SISC, though being a powerful machine learning algorithm to train and test the original signals, is quite demanding computationally. Therefore, this paper proposes a highly efficient SISC which has been proved by experiments to be capable of representing signals better and making converges faster. For better performance, the AdaBoost algorithm is also combined with SISC classifier. Validated by the fault diagnosis of bearings and compared with other methods, this algorithm has higher accuracy rate and is more robust to load as well as to certain variation of speed

Experimental Studies of The Multi-cylinders Compound Profile Meshing Pair

In order to improve the wear resistance of the meshing pair in Single Screw Compressor, our team developed the multi-cylinders compound profile which could be used in the meshing pair instead of the traditional profile. In this paper, the reliability and utility of the new profile was verified by an experiment. In this experiment, a designed multi-cylinders compound profile meshing pair was applied in an oil-flooded single screw air compressor as the experimental prototype, then the prototype ran 2000 hours continuously in the experimental platform. and the displacement was detected with changing discharge pressure and rotating speed. It is shown that the prototype has a steady displacement, and the energy efficiency grade is very close to the best grade. The displacement is slightly reduced with the discharge pressure arising, but the reduction is far less than the original single line profile meshing pair machine. These prove that the new pair has good sealing performance. A comparative observation on the star wheel profile is conducted at the end of test, and the results demonstrate that the nodular cast iron star wheel new designed has high wear resistant property and good hydrodynamic lubrication characteristic. Thus, the nodular cast iron can be used to make star wheel to reduce the cost of the single screw instead of the expensive PEEK material