48 research outputs found
Labour Administration Reforms in China
[Excerpt] This publication provides an explanation of the comprehensive labour administration system in China, including its recent advances, with emphasis on its public services functions, such as public employment, labour inspection and social insurance services. With the recent improvements to both the legal framework and the institutions of labour administration, it is believed that these public services will play bigger and more active roles in ensuring compliance with legislation and protecting the legitimate rights and interests of employers and workers alike
Shifted Diffusion for Text-to-image Generation
We present Corgi, a novel method for text-to-image generation. Corgi is based
on our proposed shifted diffusion model, which achieves better image embedding
generation from input text. Unlike the baseline diffusion model used in DALL-E
2, our method seamlessly encodes prior knowledge of the pre-trained CLIP model
in its diffusion process by designing a new initialization distribution and a
new transition step of the diffusion. Compared to the strong DALL-E 2 baseline,
our method performs better in generating image embedding from the text in terms
of both efficiency and effectiveness, resulting in better text-to-image
generation. Extensive large-scale experiments are conducted and evaluated in
terms of both quantitative measures and human evaluation, indicating a stronger
generation ability of our method compared to existing ones. Furthermore, our
model enables semi-supervised and language-free training for text-to-image
generation, where only part or none of the images in the training dataset have
an associated caption. Trained with only 1.7% of the images being captioned,
our semi-supervised model obtains FID results comparable to DALL-E 2 on
zero-shot text-to-image generation evaluated on MS-COCO. Corgi also achieves
new state-of-the-art results across different datasets on downstream
language-free text-to-image generation tasks, outperforming the previous
method, Lafite, by a large margin
Recombinant antigen P29 of Echinococcus granulosus induces Th1, Tc1, and Th17 cell immune responses in sheep
Echinococcosis is a common human and animal parasitic disease that seriously endangers human health and animal husbandry. Although studies have been conducted on vaccines for echinococcosis, to date, there is no human vaccine available for use. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of in-depth research on basic immunization with vaccines. Our previous results confirmed that recombinant antigen P29 (rEg.P29) induced more than 90% immune protection in both mice and sheep, but data on its induction of sheep-associated cellular immune responses are lacking. In this study, we investigated the changes in CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, and antigen-specific cytokines IFN-γ, IL-4, and IL-17A after rEg.P29 immunization using enzyme-linked immunospot assay (ELISPOT), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and flow cytometry to investigate the cellular immune response induced by rEg.P29 in sheep. It was found that rEg.P29 immunization did not affect the percentage of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), and was able to stimulate the proliferation of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells after immunization in vitro. Importantly, the results of both ELISPOT and ELISA showed that rEg.P29 can induce the production of the specific cytokines IFN-γ and IL-17A, and flow cytometry verified that rEg.P29 can induce the expression of IFN-γ in CD4+ and CD8+ T cells and IL-17A in CD4+ T cells; however, no IL-4 expression was observed. These results indicate that rEg.P29 can induce Th1, Th17, and Tc1 cellular immune responses in sheep against echinococcosis infection, providing theoretical support for the translation of rEg.P29 vaccine applications
Control over the Gradient Differentiation of Rat BMSCs on a PCL Membrane with Surface-Immobilized Alendronate Gradient
Gradient biomaterials can offer progressively changing
signals
to specific tissue interface, and thereby modulate the conjunction
between different tissues. A linear density gradient of alendronate
(Aln), a molecule that is capable of promoting osteogenic differentiation
of bone mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs), was created on an aminolyzed
poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) membrane. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy
and quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation revealed the linear
increase of the Aln amount as a function of the position on the PCL
membrane. By contrast, the surface wettability and energy were kept
unchanged. The surface-grafted Aln showed a stronger ability to induce
the osteogenic differentiation of rat BMSCs than its counterpart in
culture medium of the same amount, and the osteo-inductive culture
medium. On the Aln-grafted gradient surface, the BMSCs showed gradient
osteogenic differentiation as a function of membrane position in terms
of cell morphology, alkaline phosphatase activity, calcium deposition,
and the expression of osteogenesis marker proteins including collagen
type I (COL I), Runt-related transcription factor 2 (Runx2), and osteocalcin
(OCN)
Doxorubicin-conjugated pH-responsive gold nanorods for combined photothermal therapy and chemotherapy of cancer
Cancer chemotherapy can be hindered by drug resistance which leads to lower drug efficiency. Here, we have developed a drug delivery system that tethers doxorubicin to the surface of gold nanorods via a pH-sensitive linkage (AuNRs@DOX), for a combined photothermal and chemical therapy for cancer. First, AuNRs@DOX is ingested by HepG2 liver cancer cells. After endocytosis, the acidic pH triggers the release of doxorubicin, which leads to chemotherapeutic effects. The gold nanorods are not only carriers of DOX, but also photothermal conversion agents. In the presence of an 808 nm near-infrared laser, AuNRs@DOX significantly enhance the cytotoxicity of doxorubicin via the photothermal effect, which induces elevated apoptosis of hepG2 cancer cells, leading to better therapeutic effects in vitro and in vivo. Keywords: Gold nanorods, Doxorubicin, pH responsive, Photothermal therapy, Combinational therap