Rediscovering the Therapeutic Potential of Agarwood in the Management of Chronic Inflammatory Diseases

The inflammatory response is a central aspect of the human immune system that acts as a defense mechanism to protect the body against infections and injuries. A dysregulated inflammatory response is a major health concern, as it can disrupt homeostasis and lead to a plethora of chronic inflammatory conditions. These chronic inflammatory diseases are one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide and the need for them to be managed in the long term has become a crucial task to alleviate symptoms and improve patients’ overall quality of life. Although various synthetic anti-inflammatory agents have been developed to date, these medications are associated with several adverse effects that have led to poor therapeutic outcomes. The hunt for novel alternatives to modulate underlying chronic inflammatory processes has unveiled nature to be a plentiful source. One such example is agarwood, which is a valuable resinous wood from the trees of Aquilaria spp. Agarwood has been widely utilized for medicinal purposes since ancient times due to its ability to relieve pain, asthmatic symptoms, and arrest vomiting. In terms of inflammation, the major constituent of agarwood, agarwood oil, has been shown to possess multiple bioactive compounds that can regulate molecular mechanisms of chronic inflammation, thereby producing a multitude of pharmacological functions for treating various inflammatory disorders. As such, agarwood oil presents great potential to be developed as a novel anti-inflammatory therapeutic to overcome the drawbacks of existing therapies and improve treatment outcomes. In this review, we have summarized the current literature on agarwood and its bioactive components and have highlighted the potential roles of agarwood oil in treating various chronic inflammatory diseases.     

An Explicit-Implicit Predictor-Corrector Domain Decomposition Method for Time Dependent Multi-Dimensional Convection Diffusion Equations

The numerical solution of large scale multi-dimensional convection diffusion equations often requires efficient parallel algorithms. In this work, we consider the extension of a recently proposed non-overlapping domain decomposition method for two dimensional time dependent convection diffusion equations with variable coefficients. By combining predictor-corrector technique, modified upwind differences with explicitimplicit coupling, the method under consideration provides intrinsic parallelism while maintaining good stability and accuracy. Moreover, for multi-dimensional problems, the method can be readily implemented on a multi-processor system and does not have the limitation on the choice of subdomains required by some other similar predictorcorrector or stabilized schemes. These properties of the method are demonstrated in this work through both rigorous mathematical analysis and numerical experiments.