Designing polymeric particles for antigen delivery

By targeting dendritic cells, polymeric carriers in the nano to lower micron range constitute very interesting tools for antigen delivery. In this critical review, we review how new immunological insights can be exploited to design new carriers allowing one to tune immune responses and to further increase vaccine potency (137 references).     

Extensions of locally compact quantum groups and the bicrossed product construction

In the framework of locally compact quantum groups, we study cocycle actions. We develop the cocycle bicrossed product construction, starting from a matched pair of locally compact quantum groups. We define exact sequences and establish a one-to-one correspondence between cocycle bicrossed products and cleft extensions. In this way, we obtain new examples of locally compact quantum groups.     

The Contingency of the Mass Media's Political Agenda Setting Power: Toward a Preliminary Theory

Recently the study of the relationship between the media and the political agenda has received growing attention of both media and political science scholars. However, these research efforts have not led to a general discussion or a real theory on the media's political agenda setting power. This article first analytically confronts the often contradictory results of the available evidence. Then, it sketches the broad outline of a preliminary theory. Political agenda setting by the media is contingent upon a number of conditions. The input variables of the model are the kind of issues covered, the specific media outlet, and the sort of coverage. Political context variables, the features of the political actors at stake, are at the heart of the model. The model proposes five sorts of output ranging from no political adoption to fast substantial adoption of media issues.     

Distance-Regular (0,α)-Reguli

We introduce distance-regular (0,α)-reguli and show that they give rise to (0,α)-geometries with a distance-regular point graph. This generalises the SPG-reguli of Thas [14] and the strongly regular (α,β)-reguli of Hamilton and Mathon [9], which yield semipartial geometries and strongly regular (α,β)-geometries, respectively. We describe two infinite classes of examples, one of which is a generalisation of the well-known semipartial geometry T_n^*(B) arising from a Baer subspace PG(n, q) in PG(n, q²). Research Fellow supported by the Flemish Institute for the Promotion of Scientific and Technological Research in Industry (IWT), grant no. IWT/SB/13367/Tonesi Research assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen).     

Magnetic Electrospun Fibers for Cancer Therapy

Iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) for magnetic hyperthermia in cancer treatment have recently gained substantial interest. Unfortunately, the use of free IONPs still faces major challenges such as poor tumor targetability, high variability in the amount of IONPs taken up by the tumor and the IONP leakage from dead cancer cells into the surrounding healthy tissues. The present work reports on electrospun fiber webs, heavily loaded with 50 nm sized IONPs. The high loading capacity of the fibers enables significant heating of the environment upon applying an alternating magnetic field. Furthermore, magnetic fibers can be repeatedly heated without loss of heating capacity or release of IONPs. Upon functionalization of the fiber surface with collagen, human SKOV‐3 ovarian cancer cells attached well to the fibers. Applying an alternating magnetic field during 10 minutes to the fiber webs killed all fiber‐associated cancer cells. Killing the cells using this method seemed more efficient compared to the use of a warm water bath. As the fiber webs can be i) loaded with a well‐controlled amount of IONPs and ii) localized in the body by Magnetic Resonance Imaging, magnetic electrospun fibers may become promising materials for a highly reproducible (repeated) heating of cancer tissues in vivo.     

Delivering scalable video with QoS to the home

User satisfaction is a key factor in the success of novel multimedia services. Yet, to enable service providers and network operators to control and maximize the quality (QoS, QoE) of delivered video streams, quite some challenges remain. In this paper, we particularly focus on three of them. First of all, objectively measuring video quality requires appropriate quality metrics and methods of assessing them in a real-time fashion. Secondly, the recent Scalable Video Coding (SVC) format opens opportunities for adapting video to the available (network) resources, yet the appropriate configuration of video encoding as well as real-time streaming adaptation are largely unaddressed research areas. Thirdly, while bandwidth reservation mechanisms in access/core networks do exist, service providers lack a means for guaranteeing QoS in the increasingly complex home networks (which they are not in full control of). In this paper we offer a broad view on these interrelated issues, by presenting the developments originating in a Flemish research project (including proof-of-concept demonstrations). From a developmental perspective, we propose an architecture combining a real-time video quality monitoring platform, on-the-fly adaptation (optimizing the video quality) and QoS reservation in a heterogeneous home network based on UPnP QoS?v3. From a research perspective, we propose a new subjective test procedure that revealed user preference for temporal scalability over quality scalability. In addition, an extensive study on optimizing HD SVC encoding in IPTV scenarios with fluctuating bandwidth showed that under certain bandwidth constraints (prohibiting sufficient fidelity) spatial scalability is a better option than quality scalability.     

Faraday rotation and its dispersion in the visible region for saturated organic liquids

Faraday rotation and its dispersion have been measured and calculated in the 400-800 nm wavelength range for a set of saturated organic liquids. The resulting Verdet constants are fitted and trends are analyzed. Comparisons are made to both the polarizability and diamagnetic susceptibility. The data are applied to a connectivity index model, allowing prediction of Verdet constants of aliphatic organic liquids from 400 to 800 nm. The observed correlations and connectivity model improve the understanding of Faraday rotation in diamagnetic materials, allowing for future optimization.     

Synthesis of monodisperse biodegradable microgels in microfluidic devices

Microgels are promising materials in drug delivery and biomedicine. Although monodisperse microgels would offer considerable advantages, most microgels investigated and used today are polydisperse in size. We report on the fabrication of 10 mum sized monodisperse microgels by emulsifying an aqueous dextran-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (dex-HEMA) phase within an oil phase at the junction of microfluidic channels. Dex-HEMA microgels are biodegradable and are ideally suited for the controlled delivery of proteins.     

Quadratic forms with values in invertible modules

LetR be a commutative ring,I an invertibleR-module, and consider quadratic spaces with values inI. The Clifford algebra of such a quadratic space is an algebra over the generalized Rees ring associated toI. We discuss the relation between the Witt module of quadratic spaces with values inI and the graded Witt ring and the graded Brauer-Wall group of the generalized Rees ring. This leads to the introduction of three distinguished subgroups of the graded Brauer-Wall group of the generalized Rees ring. The image of the Clifford functor is a subgroup of one of these three subgroups (the type 1 subgroup).