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Epicardial delivery of human follistatin-like 1 protein (FSTL1) induces significant cardiac benefit following a myocardial infarction (MI). However, the optimal dosing regimen for maximal therapeutic benefit has not yet been elucidated. To investigate the impact of multiple FSTL1 doses, without the confounding effects of multiple surgical procedures for multidose delivery, alternative delivery strategies are needed. Here, we use an epicardial reservoir that allows non-invasive delivery of additional doses after implantation to investigate the impact of single, double, and triple FSTL1 dose regimens in a rat model of MI. Multidose delivery of FSTL1 improves ejection fraction (3 doses), fractional shortening (1, 2 and 3 doses), and chamber stiffness (2 doses) 28 days after MI. Histologically, multiple FSTL1 doses increase ventricular wall thickness (2 and 3 doses) and reduce infarct size (1, 2, and 3 doses). We also demonstrate a dose-dependent increase in blood vessel number and density in the infarct zone, with three FSTL1 doses leading to the highest improvements. This study shows that multidose delivery of FSTL1 improves cardiac function, healing, and angiogenesis following MI. The epicardial delivery platform used here may be essential in optimizing dosing regimens of various bioagent combinations for a range of clinical indications.

‘Whatever men think or say’, observed the influential Victorian headmaster Edward Thring, ‘the almighty wall is, after all, the supreme and final arbiter of schools’ (Whyte, 2003, p. 619). His conv...

This article discusses the design of unidirectional airflow systems used to ventilate operating theatres and provide low concentrations of airborne micro-organisms during surgical operations. Also described are tests that can be used to confirm that unidirectional airflow systems are well designed and perform correctly when installed and during their lifetime. Reasons are given for the failure of unidirectional airflow systems to provide low concentrations of airborne micro-organisms and reduce joint infection rates after total joint arthroplasty when compared to conventional mixed-airflow operating theatres.

The Word Blind Centre for Dyslexic Children opened in London in 1963. It was not only the first clinic established in Britain specifically to cater for children diagnosed with dyslexia. It was also intended to provide compelling evidence that a condition called dyslexia actually existed. The results of this work were published in Sandhaya Naidoo’s path-breaking study, Specific Dyslexia, which did exactly what its promoters had hoped it would, drawing on in-depth studies of 196 children to argue that dyslexia was indeed a distinct ‘constitutional disorder’. Using the archives produced by Naidoo and other sources, my article offers the first-ever account of this pioneering enterprise, exploring the reasons the Centre was set up, the way it worked, and the consequences of its work. In particular, it focuses on the rationale for Naidoo’s report, which only dealt with the experiences of middle-class boys. This choice is highly revealing, illuminating attitudes to reading, to class and gender, and to the competition for authority amongst the professionals who sought to explore all these issues. An intriguing case study in its own right, this also sets the scene for many of the themes that follow in this Special Issue.

In a recent paper the authors and their collaborators proposed a new hard problem, called the finite field isomorphism problem, and they used it to construct a fully homomorphic encryption scheme. In this paper, we investigate how one might build a digital signature scheme from this new problem. Intuitively, the hidden field isomorphism allows us to convert short vectors in the underlying lattice of one field into generic looking vectors in an isomorphic field.

In this paper we revisit the modular lattice signature scheme and its efficient instantiation known as pqNTRUSign. First, we show that a modular lattice signature scheme can be based on a standard lattice problem. The fundamental problem that needs to be solved by the signer or a potential forger is recovering a lattice vector with a restricted norm, given the least significant bits. We show that this problem is equivalent to the short integer solution (SIS) problem over the corresponding lattice. In addition, we show that by replacing the uniform sampling in pqNTRUSign with a bimodal Gaussian sampling, we can further reduce the size of a signature. An important new contribution, enabled by this Gaussian sampling version of pqNTRUSign, is that we can now perform batch verification of messages signed by the same public key, which allows the verifier to check approximately 24 signatures in a single verification process.