Potent inhibition of highly pathogenic influenza virus infection using a peptidomimetic furin inhibitor alone or in combination with conventional antiviral agents

Antiviral medication is an important option for treatment of influenza virus infections. Two classes of anti-influenza drugs are available for prophylaxis and treatment of the infections: M2 ion channel inhibitors and neuraminidase inhibitors. However, most of the currently circulating influenza A virus strains are resistant to M2 inhibitors, and wide spread application of neuraminidase inhibitors is increasing resistance to these drugs. Therefore, discovery of new antiviral drugs and more efficient therapeutic approaches are urgently needed. The hemagglutinin (HA) protein is the major membrane glycoprotein of influenza A viruses. It facilitates binding of the virus to host cell receptors and mediates fusion between viral and endosomal membranes. Precursor HA0 must be activated by host proteases to gain its fusion capacity. The cleavage motif of HA is a major determinant of influenza virus pathogenicity. HA of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV) of subtypes H5 and H7 contains a multibasic cleavage motif, which is activated by the eukaryotic subtilase furin. Furin’s essential role during the HPAIV infection makes it an attractive drug target. Novel peptidomimetics imitating the furin recognition motif -R-X-K/R-R- proved to be efficacious anti-HPAIV inhibitors. They interfered with the proteolytic activation of HA and suppressed virus replication in cell cultures. Combination of oseltamivir and ribavirin with a furin inhibitor had synergistic antiviral effects. Furthermore, it suppressed the development of oseltamivir-resistant variants. Therefore, combination treatment is considered as a promising approach for the control of HPAIV

On the Performance and Optimization for MEC Networks Using Uplink NOMA

In this paper, we investigate a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based mobile edge computing (MEC) network, in which two users may partially offload their respective tasks to a single MEC server through uplink NOMA. We propose a new offloading scheme that can operate in three different modes, namely the partial computation offloading, the complete local computation, and the complete offloading. We further derive a closed-form expression of the successful computation probability for the proposed scheme. As part of the proposed offloading scheme, we formulate a problem to maximize the successful computation probability by jointly optimizing the time for offloading, the power allocation of the two users and the offloading ratios which decide how many tasks should be offloaded to the MEC server. We obtain the optimal solutions in the closed forms. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can achieve the highest successful computation probability than the existing schemes.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE ICC Workshop 201

Study on vibration characteristics of rolling mill based on vibration absorber

The vertical vibration often occurs during the rolling production, which has an influence on the accuracy of rolling mill. In order to effectively suppress the vertical vibration of the rolling equipment, the rolling mill model with vibration absorber device was established. Based on the main resonance singularity of the rolling mill system, the best combination of opening parameters was obtained. The best combination of opening parameters helps the rolling mill system work in a stable area. Finally, the effects of different vibration absorber parameters on the vibration characteristics of the rolling mill system were analyzed. Results show that the vibration absorber device can effectively improve the stability of the rolling mill system