Ola G. Hussein, Mamdouh R. Rezk, Liliya Logoyda
et al.
ABSTRACT The pharmaceutical industry has recently introduced a new combination of eye drop containing alcaftadine (ALF) and ketorolac tromethamine (KTC) utilized in managing allergic conjunctivitis. This new formulation elevates the necessity for developing sensitive, reliable, rapid and simple spectrophotometric methods to accurately quantify ALF and KTC in their dosage form with full consideration of its preservative benzalkonium chloride. In this study, three simple green spectrophotometric methods were developed to simultaneously determine ALF, KTC, and benzalkonium chloride in their ternary combinations without requiring preliminary separation steps. The expected methods employed unique spectral properties of the mixture including the extension of KTC's spectrum beyond that of ALF. The suggested methods were direct spectrophotometric, absorbance resolution, and factorized zero‐order methods. The proposed methods were assessed for validity in accordance with ICH guidelines and were determined to be linear within concentration ranges of 1.0–14.0 µg/mL for ALF and 3.0–30.0 µg/mL for KTC. A statistical comparison between the developed methods versus the reported and official methods revealed lack of any difference in terms of accuracy and precision. The work was also considered a successful attempt to stick to Green Analytical Chemistry principles and preserve our environment via using water as the main solvent. This was reflected by the highest greenness score of the proposed methods upon adopting state‐of‐the art assessment metric tools including Complementary Green Analytical Procedure Index (ComplexGAPI) and analytical GREEnness (AGREE). Considering these benefits, our developed methods were demonstrated to be green, sensitive, and accurate making it suitable for routine drug analysis.
Ali Bakhshi Movahed, Hamed Nozari, Aminmasoud Bakhshi Movahed
Technology plays an undeniable role in today's industrial world, especially in manufacturing and smart factories. Unlike previous industrial revolutions, humans are at the core of the fifth generation of the Industrial Revolution. One of the critical aspects of Industry 5.0 (I 5.0) is its emphasis on human-centricity. The integration of modern technologies can be clearly observed in smart factories, which offer enhanced comfort and professionalism. This study highlights the significance of I 5.0 and smart factory production (SFP). A total of 36 articles are reviewed and systematically categorized using the meta-synthesis methodology. The research emphasizes the influence of I 5.0 on SFP through the use of modern technologies and comprehensive policy frameworks. This new paradigm has the potential to streamline people's lives and bring a transformative shift to smart factory production lines. Enhancing the structure of factories appears feasible under this optimistic perspective.
Toni Seibold, Fabian Neumann, Falko Ueckerdt
et al.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the steel, fertiliser and plastic industries can be mitigated by producing their precursors with green hydrogen. In Germany, green production may be economically unviable due to high energy costs. This study quantifies the 'renewables pull' of cheaper production abroad and high-lights trade-offs between cost savings and import dependence. Using a detailed European energy system model coupled to global supply curves for hydrogen and industry precursors (hot briquetted iron, ammonia and methanol), we assess five scenarios with increasing degrees of freedom with respect to imports. We find that precursor import is preferred over hydrogen import because there are significant savings in hydrogen infrastructure. Cost savings in the German industry sector from shifting precursor production to European partners compared to domestic production are at 4.1 bnEUR/a or 11.2 %. This strategy captures 47.7 % of the cost savings achievable by precursor import from non-European countries, which lowers industry costs by 8.6 bnEUR/a (23.3 %). Moving energy-intensive precursor production abroad allows Germany to save costs while still retaining a substantial share of subsequent value-creating industry. However, cost savings must be weighed against the risks of import dependence, which can be mitigated by sourcing exclusively from regional partners.
Carlos Alberto Durigan Junior, Kumiko Oshio Kissimoto, Fernando Jose Barbin Laurindo
The fourth industrial revolution promotes the integration of Information Technology (IT) and strategic resources. New IT demands and uses have been leading to changes in business processes and corporate governance. Lately, the financial industry has adopted a new integrated banking model known as Open Banking (OB) and the advent of cryptocurrencies has led to the Digital Economy (DE) materialization. Considering these facts, this paper expects to point out through literature review some IT enabling factors that allow the conception of a new industry design (or governance) specifically in the financial industry illustrated by the cases of the Open Banking and Digital Economy. This paper is structured mostly on literature review, accompanied by results, discussions, and finally, conclusions are presented. It was found five potential enabling factors. Keywords: Digital Economy, Information Technology (IT), Open Banking.
Silvia García-Méndez, Francisco de Arriba-Pérez, María del Carmen Somoza-López
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can potentially transform the industry, enhancing the production process and minimizing manual, repetitive tasks. Accordingly, the synergy between high-performance computing and powerful mathematical models enables the application of sophisticated data analysis procedures like Machine Learning. However, challenges exist regarding effective, efficient, and flexible processing to generate valuable knowledge. Consequently, this work comprehensively describes industrial challenges where AI can be exploited, focusing on the dairy industry. The conclusions presented can help researchers apply novel approaches for cattle monitoring and farmers by proposing advanced technological solutions to their needs.
For Industry 4.0 applications, communication protocols and data formats even for legacy devices are fundamental. In this paper, we focus on the Modbus/TCP protocol, which is, e.g., used in energy metering. Allowing Industry 4.0 applications to include data from such protocols without need for programming would increase flexibility and, in turn, improve development efficiency. As one particular approach, we discuss the automated generation of Modbus/TCP connectors for our Open Source oktoflow platform and compare the performance of handcrafted as well as generated connectors in different settings, including industrial energy metering devices.
M. A. Vodyakova, O. A. Rachinskaya, N. S. Pokrovsky
et al.
Introduction. Identity is an important quality attribute of products containing viable human cells, to be tested during the quality control. The verification of identity includes, among other things, determination of the proliferative activity of the cell lines included in such products. The Agilent xCELLigence real-time cell analysis (RTCA) DP (dual purpose) instrument (USA) for continuous, label-free in vitro analysis can be used to assess the cell proliferative activity.Aim. Demonstration of reproducibility of the RTCA profiling technique as a test method for primary verification of the cell line identity.Materials and methods. An xCELLigence RTCA DP cell analyzer (Agilent Technologies, USA) was used to obtain RTCA profiles of dermal fibroblast (DF-2) and adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stromal (MSC AT_D122) cell lines. The experiment was carried out in triplicate after thawing three different vials from the same batch for each cell line.Results and discussion. The RTCA profiles were obtained for DF-2 and MSC AT_D122 cell lines. The statistical processing of the results was carried out using the Friedman test, confidence intervals, and growth curve parameters obtained by the instrument (doubling time, proliferation rate, and maximum cell index). The obtained data demonstrate no differences in the RTCA profiles after parallel sampling of the contents from three vials for each cell line.Conclusion. The RTCA profiling reproducibility was confirmed in order to assess the cell analyzer’s applicability to cell line identity.
Abstract Membrane proteins (MPs) play key roles in cellular signaling pathways and are responsible for intercellular and intracellular interactions. Dysfunctional MPs are directly related to the pathogenesis of various diseases, and they have been exploited as one of the most sought‐after targets in the pharmaceutical industry. However, working with MPs is difficult given that their amphiphilic nature requires protection from biological membrane or membrane mimetics. Polymersomes are bilayered nano‐vesicles made of self‐assembled block copolymers that have been widely used as cell membrane mimetics for MP reconstitution and in engineering of artificial cells. This review highlights the prevailing trend in the application of polymersomes in MP study and drug discovery. We begin with a review on the techniques for synthesis and characterization of polymersomes as well as methods of MP insertion to form proteopolymersomes. Next, we review the structural and functional analysis of the different types of MPs reconstituted in polymersomes, including membrane transport proteins, MP complexes, and membrane receptors. We then summarize the factors affecting reconstitution efficiency and the quality of reconstituted MPs for structural and functional studies. Additionally, we discuss the potential in using proteopolymersomes as platforms for high‐throughput screening (HTS) in drug discovery to identify modulators of MPs. We conclude by providing future perspectives and recommendations on advancing the study of MPs and drug development using proteopolymersomes.
Nos últimos dois anos o mundo vivenciou uma crise sanitária com a pandemia do coronavírus 19 (COVID-19). O crescimento exponencial de casos novos da doença no globo e o aumento da morbidade e mortalidade levou a busca incessante por novas terapias que pudessem aumentar as curvas de cura da infecção. As vacinas e terapias de suporte ainda fazem parte do escopo de inúmeras Farmacêuticas que investem em pesquisa clínica para obtenção de melhores resultados.
O SARS-CoV-2, vírus causador da doença COVID-19, pode resultar em sintomas respiratórios rápidos e intensos, insuficiência pulmonar e até o óbito. Dos sintomas que podem ser apresentados é reportadona literatura febre, tosse, mialgia ou fadiga, seguidos por pneumonia e dispneia. Sintomas relatados menos comuns incluem: dor de cabeça, diarreia e hemoptise.
Pharmacy and materia medica, Pharmaceutical industry
Galia Gentscheva, Krastena Nikolova, Veselina Panayotova
et al.
<i>Arthrospira platensis is</i> a filamentous cyanobacterium of the class Cyanophyceae and is the most cultivated photosynthetic prokaryote. It is used in the pharmaceutical sector, medicine and the food industry. It has a rich micro- and macro-element composition, containing proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, essential amino acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, minerals and raw fibers. It is a commonly used ingredient in food products and nutritional supplements. The wide range of biologically active components determines its diverse pharmacological properties (antioxidant, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, antineoplastic, antitumor, anti-inflammatory, photoprotective, antiviral, etc.). This review summarizes research related to the taxonomy, distribution and chemical composition of <i>Arthrospira platensis</i> as well as its potential application in the food and pharmaceutical industries. Attention is drawn to its various medical applications as an antidiabetic and antiobesity agent, with hepatoprotective, antitumor, antimicrobial and antiviral effects as well as regulatory effects on neurodegenerative diseases.
Fabiana Barbosa do Nascimento Silva, Sheila Elcielle D’Almeida Arruda, Taís Ferreira da Silva
et al.
A Assistência farmacêutica é um conjunto de ações voltadas à promoção, proteção e recuperação da saúde, tanto individual como coletiva, tendo o medicamento como insumo essencial e visando o acesso e seu uso racional (BRASIL, 2004), no Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) engloba diversas atividades, tais como: seleção, programação, aquisição, armazenamento e distribuição, controle da qualidade e utilização de medicamentos (BRASIL, 2001), demandando desafios importantes com foco no acesso da população aos medicamentos – tanto os essenciais como os excepcionais – em especial para aquela camada menos favorecida da sociedade (TAVARES et al., 2010). No município de Jaboatão dos Guararapes/PE, há um setor específico da Coordenação da Assistência Farmacêutica responde pelas demandas especiais na área de medicamentos, sendo direcionadas a esse setor as solicitações de medicamentos não padronizados no município, inclusive oriundas de demandas judiciais. A judicialização a princípio seria a última alternativa para obtenção de medicamento ou tratamento negado pelo SUS, quer seja por falta de previsão na Relação Nacional de Medicamentos (RENAME), ou por questões orçamentárias (SILVA, 2013). Com o intuito de avaliar o custo dos produtos atendidos por demandas judiciais, categorização dos produtos atendidos, e verificar as competências do atendimento, realizou-se estudo retrospectivo descritivo, no período de 01 de janeiro a 30 de abril de 2016, através da análise de dados secundários, obtidos dos comprovantes de fornecimento dos produtos, emitidos pelo Sistema Nacional de Gestão da Assistência Farmacêutica - HÓRUS, e disposto em planilha de excel®. Dos resultados obtidos 90% dos produtos entregues por determinação judicial 94,4% são medicamentos (17 medicamentos com custo total R$ 7.956,73), 5,6% são produtos de higiene pessoal (1 produto com custo total R$ 531,00), o produto de higiene tratam-se de fraldas, já os medicamentos, sete deles são disponibilizados, mediante protocolos e documentos pré-determinados, pela farmácia do estado de Pernambuco e um disponibilizado em hospitais de referência no Estado de PE, os oito medicamentos, cuja a competência do fornecimento seria do Estado, custaram ao município RS 4.190,65. Desta forma, observa-se que o município, por força judicial, acabou por financiar, com recursos próprios, medicamentos que deveriam ser financiados por outro ente da administração pública e dispensados pelo Estado de PE à população, privando-se, o município de otimizar seus recursos em outros itens de impacto epidemiológico importante para a sua população. O direito a saúde é legítimo e dever do Estado, isto é inquestionável, porém se faz necessária uma maior integração entre o aporte jurídico e equipe farmacêutica dotada de conhecimento técnico e esclarecedores sobre as competências dos financiamentos dos medicamentos, de maneira que cada ente da administração pública assuma o seu papel.
Pharmacy and materia medica, Pharmaceutical industry
Bram van den Akker, Olivier Jeunen, Ying Li
et al.
The bandit paradigm provides a unified modeling framework for problems that require decision-making under uncertainty. Because many business metrics can be viewed as rewards (a.k.a. utilities) that result from actions, bandit algorithms have seen a large and growing interest from industrial applications, such as search, recommendation and advertising. Indeed, with the bandit lens comes the promise of direct optimisation for the metrics we care about. Nevertheless, the road to successfully applying bandits in production is not an easy one. Even when the action space and rewards are well-defined, practitioners still need to make decisions regarding multi-arm or contextual approaches, on- or off-policy setups, delayed or immediate feedback, myopic or long-term optimisation, etc. To make matters worse, industrial platforms typically give rise to large action spaces in which existing approaches tend to break down. The research literature on these topics is broad and vast, but this can overwhelm practitioners, whose primary aim is to solve practical problems, and therefore need to decide on a specific instantiation or approach for each project. This tutorial will take a step towards filling that gap between the theory and practice of bandits. Our goal is to present a unified overview of the field and its existing terminology, concepts and algorithms -- with a focus on problems relevant to industry. We hope our industrial perspective will help future practitioners who wish to leverage the bandit paradigm for their application.
With the growing competition in banking industry, banks are required to follow customer retention strategies while they are trying to increase their market share by acquiring new customers. This study compares the performance of six supervised classification techniques to suggest an efficient model to predict customer churn in banking industry, given 10 demographic and personal attributes from 10000 customers of European banks. The effect of feature selection, class imbalance, and outliers will be discussed for ANN and random forest as the two competing models. As shown, unlike random forest, ANN does not reveal any serious concern regarding overfitting and is also robust to noise. Therefore, ANN structure with five nodes in a single hidden layer is recognized as the best performing classifier.
Victoria Pilkington, Victoria Pilkington, Sarai Mirjam Keestra
et al.
Within the first year of distribution of vaccines against COVID-19, high-income countries (HICs) have achieved vaccination rates of 75-80%, whilst low-income countries (LICs) vaccinated <10%. This disparity in access has been one of the greatest failures of international cooperation during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Global COVID-19 vaccine inequity affects us all, with ongoing risk of new variants emerging until global herd immunity is strengthened. The current model of global vaccine distribution is based on financial competition for limited vaccine supplies, resulting in HICs getting first access to vaccines, with LICs being forced to rely on voluntary donations through schemes like COVAX. Pharmaceutical companies own the intellectual property (IP) rights for COVID-19 vaccines, allowing them to control manufacturing, distribution, and pricing. However, the pharmaceutical industry did not develop these vaccines alone, with billions of dollars of public funding being instrumental in their discovery and development. Solutions to enable global equitable access already exist. The next step in scale up of manufacture and distribution worldwide is equitable knowledge sharing and technology transfer. The World Health Organization centralized technology transfer hub would facilitate international cooperation. Investments made into developing this infrastructure benefit the COVID-19 response whilst promoting future pandemic preparedness. Whilst globally there is majority support for waivers of IP to facilitate this next step, key opponents blocking this move include the UK and other European countries which host large domestic pharmaceutical industries. A nationalistic approach is not effective during a global pandemic. International cooperation is essential to achieve global goals against COVID-19.
Introduction. This work is devoted to the intestinal permeability study of 7-(2-chlorophenyl)-4-(4-methyl-1,3-thiazol-5-yl)-4,6,7,8-tetrahydroquinoline-2,5(1H,3H)-dione – innovative biologically active substance with TRPA1 antagonist activity. The phenyltetrahydroquinolinedione derivative is a promising analgesic and anti-inflammatory drug. To develop a dosage form of this new substance, it is necessary to study the mechanism and degree of its absorption.Aim. The aim of this work was to investigate the intestinal permeability of the phenyltetrahydroquinolinedione derivative using Caco-2 cell model and to compare experimental results with the in silico obtained values of the octanol/water partition coefficients.Materials and methods. The study of permeability was carried out from the apical membrane to the basolateral (A-B) and in the opposite direction (B-A). Ranitidine (low permeability), propranolol (high permeability) and rhodamine 123 (P-glycoprotein substrate) were used as control compounds. The concentration of the test compound was determined by UHPLC-MS/MS system consisting of a liquid chromatograph and a tandem mass spectrometer with a triple quadrupole and an electrospray ion source. The logP was calculated using the following resources: ChemDraw Professional 16.0, Molinspiration, ALOGPS 2.1.Results and discussion. The values of the apparent permeability (Papp) and efflux ratios of the test and control compounds were obtained. According to the results of the study, the following conclusions were made: the test compound has high permeability both in the forward direction from the apical to the basolateral cell membrane, and in the opposite direction (Papp > 10 × 10-6 cm/s). P-glycoprotein-mediated efflux activity was not observed (the efflux ratio was less than 2 units). The permeability did not depend on the test compound input concentration. The obtained experimental Papp values were correlated with the in silico obtained values of partition coefficients. The best correlation was obtained for milogP (Molinspiration) and ClogP (ChemDraw).Conclusion. Thus, the in vitro and in silico obtained data indicate that passive diffusion is the main mechanism of absorption of the test compound in the gastrointestinal tract.
The use of taxonomic metadata in technical communication is not only transforming more and more to multi-hierarchical ontologies but also gaining attraction and new use cases beyond technical authoring. In the field of technical documentation, by classifying text modules product documentations can be generated automatically. This approach can also be applied to other documents containing classified objects, which should be merged according to certain specifications and requirements. Based on the way of working in content management systems (CMS), in this paper, a use case from pharmaceutical machinery industry (provided by SKAN AG) is shown in which the creation of a plant-specific alarm matrix should be implemented in a partially automated way.
Depending on the complexity of the plant, usually, the process to build an alarm matrix for a project takes an automation engineer approximately two weeks and shows non-standardized manual steps and elements, that make the process complex. By developing comprehensive standards of alarm matrices, the inheritance of properties to newly created matrices should be possible with the help of metadata in order to reduce the initial creation effort. For this purpose, individual components of the alarm matrix are to be managed as objects for the variant management and component identifications are to be automated through the machine processing of the planning documents. By working out the relations between individual documents, elements, and components, the necessary basis was to be created for making the underlying logic machine-interpretable.
Abdul Walusansa, Savina Asiimwe, Jesca. L. Nakavuma
et al.
Abstract Background Antimicrobial resistance is swiftly increasing all over the world. In Africa, it manifests more in pathogenic bacteria in form of antibiotic resistance (ABR). On this continent, bacterial contamination of commonly used herbal medicine (HM) is on the increase, but information about antimicrobial resistance in these contaminants is limited due to fragmented studies. Here, we analyzed research that characterized ABR in pathogenic bacteria isolated from HM in Africa since 2000; to generate a comprehensive understanding of the drug-resistant bacterial contamination burden in this region. Methods The study was conducted according to standards of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA). We searched for articles from 12 databases. These were: PubMed, Science Direct, Scifinder scholar, Google scholar, HerbMed, Medline, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau Abstracts, African Journal Online, and Biological Abstracts. Prevalence and ABR traits of bacterial isolates, Cochran’s Q test, and the I2 statistic for heterogeneity were evaluated using MedCalcs software. A random-effects model was used to determine the pooled prevalence of ABR traits. The potential sources of heterogeneity were examined through sensitivity analysis, subgroup analysis, and meta-regression at a 95% level of significance. Findings Eighteen studies met our inclusion criteria. The pooled prevalence of bacterial resistance to at least one conventional drug was 86.51% (95% CI = 61.247–99.357%). The studies were highly heterogeneous (I 2 = 99.17%; p < 0.0001), with no evidence of publication bias. The most prevalent multidrug-resistant species was Escherichia coli (24.0%). The most highly resisted drug was Ceftazidime with a pooled prevalence of 95.10% (95% CI = 78.51–99.87%), while the drug-class was 3rd generation cephalosporins; 91.64% (95% CI = 78.64–96.73%). None of the eligible studies tested isolates for Carbapenem resistance. Extended Spectrum β-lactamase genes were detected in 89 (37.2%) isolates, mostly Salmonella spp., Proteus vulgaris, and K. pneumonia. Resistance plasmids were found in 6 (5.8%) isolates; the heaviest plasmid weighed 23,130 Kilobases, and Proteus vulgaris harbored the majority (n = 5; 83.3%). Conclusions Herbal medicines in Africa harbor bacterial contaminants which are highly resistant to conventional medicines. This points to a potential treatment failure when these contaminants are involved in diseases causation. More research on this subject is recommended, to fill the evidence gaps and support the formation of collaborative quality control mechanisms for the herbal medicine industry in Africa.
Natural products (NPs) have historically played a primary role in the discovery of small-molecule drugs. However, due to the advent of other methodologies and the drawbacks of NPs, the pharmaceutical industry has largely declined in interest regarding the screening of new drugs from NPs since 2000. There are many technical bottlenecks to quickly obtaining new bioactive NPs on a large scale, which has made NP-based drug discovery very time-consuming, and the first thorny problem faced by researchers is how to dereplicate NPs from crude extracts. Remarkably, with the rapid development of omics, analytical instrumentation, and artificial intelligence technology, in 2012, an efficient approach, known as tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS)-based molecular networking (MN) analysis, was developed to avoid the rediscovery of known compounds from the complex natural mixtures. Then, in the past decade, based on the classical MN (CLMN), feature-based MN (FBMN), ion identity MN (IIMN), building blocks-based molecular network (BBMN), substructure-based MN (MS2LDA), and bioactivity-based MN (BMN) methods have been presented. In this paper, we review the basic principles, general workflow, and application examples of the methods mentioned above, to further the research and applications of these methods.