Investigating Virus Clearance via pH Inactivation During Biomanufacturing

In the processing of biopharmaceuticals, viral clearance and viral safety are important for the development of monoclonal antibodies. Murine xenotropic leukemia virus (XMuLV) is one of the retroviruses, recommended by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a model virus for viral clearance via inactivation from therapeutics derived from Chinese hamster ovary cells (CHO). A robust and effective method was investigated to clear or inactivate endogenous viruses by low pH inactivation. The effects of different conductivity and inactivated time on XMuLV clearance was determined. Acetate buffer was prepared with different conductivity, and 2% XMuLV was spiked into acetate buffer. XMuLV virus particles could be effectively inactivated in acetate buffer at pH 3.6. According to TICD50 assay, the inactivation time of around 60 minutes was enough to clear all the viruses with more than 4 logs reduction value (LRV). Also, 50 mM acetate buffer has the most rapid inactivation process. TICD50 assays were able to determine the XMuLV virus titer within 95% confidence level, by using 8 replicates and 10-fold series dilution factor

Development of Collaborative SLAM Algorithm for Team of Robots

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental problem for building truly automatic robots. Varieties of methods and algorithms have been generated, and applied into mobile robots during the last thirty years. However, each algorithm has its strength and weakness. This thesis studies the most recent published techniques in the field of mobile robot SLAM. Specifically, it focuses on investigating robot path and landmark position estimating errors made by different methods. The Hybrid method, which uses FastSLAM method as front-end and uses EKF-SLAM method as back-end, combines both methods advantages, producing smaller errors on estimating robot pose. The Hybrid method solves the single robot SLAM problems by summing the weighted mean values of each particle in FastSLAM. The contributions of this thesis is it presents an alternate mapping algorithm that extends this single-robot Hybrid SLAM algorithm to a multi-robot SLAM algorithm. In this algorithm, each robot draws map of the environment separately, and robots could transfer their mapping information into a central computer. The central computer could merge the landmark positions from different robots. At last, a revised landmark position as well as its covariance will be calculated. Landmark positions are fused together according to two robots feature information by using Kalman Filters

A Situation of Economic Management in NTU Cooperative Fuzzy Games

In economic management, we often use some (divisible) private resources to cooperative. Fuzzy coalitions always be used to describe this situation in cooperative fuzzy games. In this paper, we proposed two new solution concepts in NTU cooperative fuzzy games, and discussed their properties

Hybrid Fault-Tolerant Consensus in Asynchronous and Wireless Embedded Systems

Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus in an asynchronous system can only tolerate up to floor[(n-1)/3] faulty processes in a group of n processes. This is quite a strict limit in certain application scenarios, for example a group consisting of only 3 processes. In order to break through this limit, we can leverage a hybrid fault model, in which a subset of the system is enhanced and cannot be arbitrarily faulty except for crashing. Based on this model, we propose a randomized binary consensus algorithm that executes in complete asynchrony, rather than in partial synchrony required by deterministic algorithms. It can tolerate up to floor[(n-1)/2] Byzantine faulty processes as long as the trusted subsystem in each process is not compromised, and terminates with a probability of one. The algorithm is resilient against a strong adversary, i. e. the adversary is able to inspect the state of the whole system, manipulate the delay of every message and process, and then adjust its faulty behaviour during execution. From a practical point of view, the algorithm is lightweight and has little dependency on lower level protocols or communication primitives. We evaluate the algorithm and the results show that it performs promisingly in a testbed consisting of up to 10 embedded devices connected via an ad hoc wireless network

A Mathematical Model for Thermosensitive Liposomal Delivery of Doxorubicin to Solid Tumour

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Joint Radio Frequency Fingerprints Identification via Multi-antenna Receiver

In Internet of Things (IoT), radio frequency fingerprints (RFF) technology has been widely used for passive security authentication to identify the special emitter. However, few works took advantage of independent oscillator distortions at the receiver side, and no work has yet considered filtering receiver distortions. In this paper, we investigate the RFF identification (RFFI) involving unknown receiver distortions, where the phase noise caused by each antenna oscillator is independent. Three RFF schemes are proposed according to the number of receiving antennas. When the number is small, the Mutual Information Weighting Scheme (MIWS) is developed by calculating the weighted voting of RFFI result at each antenna; when the number is moderate, the Distortions Filtering Scheme (DFS) is developed by filtering out the channel noise and receiver distortions; when the number is large enough, the Group-Distortions Filtering and Weighting Scheme (GDFWS) is developed, which integrates the advantages of MIWS and DFS. Furthermore, the ability of DFS to filter out the channel noise and receiver distortions is theoretically analyzed at a specific confidence level. Experiments are provided when both channel noise and receiver distortions exist, which verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed schemes

On the Analysis of the Illumina 450k Array Data: Probes Ambiguously Mapped to the Human Genome

We pointed out that a substantial number of CpG probes on the Illumina 450K array could be mapped to multiple loci across the human genome. These CpGs need to be considered when interpreting results using this platform