Product development and programmatic implementation of TYPBAR TCV® and ROTAVAC® vaccines

TYP TCV® from Bharat Biotech, is the First Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine Prequalified by WHO. It is the first typhoid vaccine, clinically proven to be administered to children from 6 months of age to adults and confers long term protection against salmonella typhi. International Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates that in 2016, there were approximately 12 million cases of typhoid fever resulting in around 130,000 deaths. In most developing countries the cost of a course of treatment for typhoid fever ranges from $50 to$5000 for outpatient and inpatient treatments. TYPBAR TCV® is a result of dedicated product development at Bharat Biotech since 2001, with the strains provided by Dr. John Robbins, where all aspects of the product profile were studied and evaluated in human clinical trials. With 5 years of follow up data for seroconversion, TYPBAR TCV® at 25μg / dose has proven long term protection for children and adults alike and can be administered to children from 6 months of age and WHO-SAGE recommended the use of typhoid conjugate vaccines for use in infants between 6 and 23 months of age and catch up vaccinations for children between 2 and 15 years of age. This recommendation paves the way for countries to introduce the vaccine into their immunization programs. Oxford University conducted a human challenge study with TYPBARTCV®, where the subjects were challenged with live S. Typhi proving a protective efficacy of 87% against typhoid fever. Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe diarrhoea and death among children less than five years of age around the world. According to a recent study, 37 percent of the 578,000 childhood diarrheal deaths in 2013 were due to rotavirus. Vaccinations are an important part of global public health efforts to meet the Sustainable Developmental Goals of UNDP. ROTAVAC® was developed as a result of a multi country - multi partner collaborative model of Team science for over 2 decades and has covered all aspects of product development, licensure, and WHO prequalification, and represents a true reflection of “Clone to Clinic to Global Access”, resulting in a lifesaving product for global populations. The product profile of ROTAVAC® has been optimally designed for the developing world by the developing world to aid ease of administration, reduced training requirements, and with the lowest cold chain footprint for an oral rotavirus vaccine in the world. The project to develop ROTAVAC® has resulted in more than 15 international publications in peer reviewed journals, including the pivotal phase III publication in Lancet in 2014 proving its comparable efficacy in the developing world. ROTAVAC® has 5 global patents, granted in countries such as India, USA, UK, South Africa, China, Nigeria, among several others. Product registrations for ROTAVAC® are in process in more than 30 countries globally

Molecular communication in fluid media: The additive inverse Gaussian noise channel

We consider molecular communication, with information conveyed in the time of release of molecules. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a theoretical foundation for such a communication system. Specifically, we develop the additive inverse Gaussian (IG) noise channel model: a channel in which the information is corrupted by noise with an inverse Gaussian distribution. We show that such a channel model is appropriate for molecular communication in fluid media - when propagation between transmitter and receiver is governed by Brownian motion and when there is positive drift from transmitter to receiver. Taking advantage of the available literature on the IG distribution, upper and lower bounds on channel capacity are developed, and a maximum likelihood receiver is derived. Theory and simulation results are presented which show that such a channel does not have a single quality measure analogous to signal-to-noise ratio in the AWGN channel. It is also shown that the use of multiple molecules leads to reduced error rate in a manner akin to diversity order in wireless communications. Finally, we discuss some open problems in molecular communications that arise from the IG system model.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Corrects minor typos in the first versio

Self maps of homogeneous spaces

This article does not have an abstract

Development of a creep data base management system for engineering materials

A fully menu driven creep data base management system has been developed for various high temperature materials using the client /server (C/S) architecture with Sybase system. 10 as backend and power builder 4.0 as an inter-face. The relational data base constitutes of various classes of materials, their heat treatment, prior history and the related creep properties at different test condit-ions, in addition to the source process route and chemical composition details.Top-down approach has been adopted in designing the entity-relationship (E-R) model. The creep data is organized into the third normal form, and the entire system is divided into manageable modules. Coding for the system is done using Transact-SQL for data defin- ition, manipulation and control operations, and power script language for application development. This article briefly outlines the formulation of data base design, and the implemented E-R model, in addition , to the prese-ntation of various screen formats used for data entry and retrieval modules

Yield and Quality of Passion Fruit in Relation to Training Systems

Four different training systems, viz., Kniffin, High trellis, Tatura and Bower were evaluated in passion fruit cv. Kaveri. Kniffin system with 4 arms recorded highest cumulative yield of 67.22 t/ha with a cost:benefit ratio of 1:4.25, followed by Kniffin 2 arm and 6 arm, respectively. Kniffin system was also the most ideal system of training for passion fruit, facilitating easy cultural operations. Although Tatura system recorded highest cumulative yield/vine (43.57kg), it registered lowest yield/ha, largely due to lower plant population/ha (1250 vines/ha). Fruit quality parameters like TSS, Vit. C, carotene content and titrable acidity were not significantly influenced by different training systems. Similarly, interception of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) by the canopy did not differ significantly among training systems. Though photosynthetic rate did not differ significantly, shaded leaves in the canopy did not contribute photosynthates and were parasitic on the vine

Thompson Sampling with Virtual Helping Agents

We address the problem of online sequential decision making, i.e., balancing the trade-off between exploiting the current knowledge to maximize immediate performance and exploring the new information to gain long-term benefits using the multi-armed bandit framework. Thompson sampling is one of the heuristics for choosing actions that address this exploration-exploitation dilemma. We first propose a general framework that helps heuristically tune the exploration versus exploitation trade-off in Thompson sampling using multiple samples from the posterior distribution. Utilizing this framework, we propose two algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem and provide theoretical bounds on the cumulative regret. Next, we demonstrate the empirical improvement in the cumulative regret performance of the proposed algorithm over Thompson Sampling. We also show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on real-world datasets. Contrary to the existing methods, our framework provides a mechanism to vary the amount of exploration/ exploitation based on the task at hand. Towards this end, we extend our framework for two additional problems, i.e., best arm identification and time-sensitive learning in bandits and compare our algorithm with existing methods.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Load Flow Solution of Distribution Systems - A Bibliometric Survey

In this paper, Bibliometric Survey has been carried out on ‘Load Flow Solution of Distribution Systems’ from 2012 to 2021. Scopus database has been used for the analysis. There were total 1711 documents found on this topic. The statistical analysis is carried out source wise, year wise, area wise, Country wise, University wise, author wise, and based on funding agency. Network analysis is also carried out based on Co-authorship, Co-occurrence. Results are presented. During 2020 and 2018, there were 263 documents published which is the highest. ‘IEEE Transactions on Power Systems’ has published 90 documents during the period of study which is the highest in terms of articles under the category of sources. Highest citations were received by the article authored by Hung and Mithulanathan with 484 citations in the collected database with the chosen key words. VOSviewer 1.6.16 is the software that is used for the statistical analysis and network analysis on the database. It provides a very effective way to analyze the co-authorship, co-occurrences, citation and bibliometric analysis etc. The Source for all Tables and figures is www.scopus.com, The data is assessed on 6th July, 2021