Controlled drug delivery from a multilayer spherical capsule is used for several therapeutic applications. Developing a theoretical understanding of mass transfer in the multilayer capsule is critical for understanding and optimizing targeted drug delivery. This paper presents an analytical solution for the mass transport problem in a general multilayer sphere involving diffusion as well as drug immobilization in various layers due to binding reactions.

Space exploration is revealing the abundance of other solar systems, but at the same time is showing the uniqueness of our Planet. Using sophisticated Earth Observation technologies such as the European "Sentinels", belonging to the greatest Earth Observation programme ever realised, Copernicus, we are now getting plenty of information at unprecedented high spatial and temporal resolution.

The aim of the work is to propose a methodology for the stimulation of a 3D in vitro skin model to activate wound healing.

Network embedding, also known as network representation learning, aims at defining low-dimensional, continuous vector representation of nodes to maximally preserve the network structure. Recent efforts attempt to extend network embedding to attributed networks where nodes are enriched with descriptors, to enhance interpretability. However, most of these efforts seldom consider the additional knowledge relevant to the aim of the downstream network analysis, i.e. task-related information. When they do, they are analysis-specific and thus lack adaptability to alternative tasks.

Motivation Inflammation is part of the complex function that addresses harmful stimuli, and the first phase of wound healing (WH), which guarantees living systems' homeostasis. Deviances from physiology make inflammation turn acute (sepsis, 11M death/y) or chronic (non-communicable diseases, 41M death/y). Therefore, tackling inflammation is a key priority.

Advanced age is the major risk factor for idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD), but to date the biological relationship between PD and ageing remains elusive. Here we describe the rationale and the design of the H2020 funded project "PROPAG-AGEING", whose aim is to characterize the contribution of the ageing process to PD development. We summarize current evidences that support the existence of a continuum between ageing and PD and justify the use of a Geroscience approach to study PD.

Background: The aim of the present paper is to construct an emulator of a complex biological system simulator using a machine learning approach. More specifically, the simulator is a patient-specific model that integrates metabolic, nutritional, and lifestyle data to predict the metabolic and inflammatory processes underlying the development of type-2 diabetes in absence of familiarity. Given the very high incidence of type-2 diabetes, the implementation of this predictive model on mobile devices could provide a useful instrument to assess the risk of the disease for aware individuals.

We propose a numerical method for approximating integro-differential equations arising in age-of-infection epidemic models. The method is based on a non-standard finite differences approximation of the integral term appearing in the equation. The study of convergence properties and the analysis of the qualitative behavior of the numerical solution show that it preserves all the basic properties of the continuous model with no restrictive conditions on the step-length h of integration and that it recovers the continuous dynamic as h tends to zero.

Defining accurate and flexible models for real-world networks of human beings is instrumental to understand the observed properties of phenomena taking place across those networks and to support computer simulations of dynamic processes of interest for several areas of research - including computational epidemiology, which is recently high on the agenda. In this paper we present a flexible model to generate age-stratified and geo-referenced synthetic social networks on the basis of widely available aggregated demographic data and, possibly, of estimated age-based social mixing patterns.