Role of Ashwangandha (Withania Somnifera) in Immune Modulation: Proposed Influence in Immune-Regulation

The immune system evolved to protect organisms from an infinite variety of disease-causing agents but to avoid harmful responses to self. However, such a powerf~dl efense mechanism requires regulation. Immune regulation includes homeostatic and cellmediated targeted mechanisms to the activation, differentiation and function of antigen-triggered immuno-competent cells and irnmunoregulatory cells. The regulation of the immune system has been a major challenge for the management of autoimmune disorders, tumor immunity, infectious diseases and organ transplants. However, irnmuno-modulatory procedures used by modern medicine to induce immunoregulatory function have deleterious side effects. Ashwangandha (Withania somnifera), an herb used in Ayurvedic medicine is being tested and used in experimental and clinical cases with potential immuno-modulatory functions without any side effects. Here we propose future usages of Ashwangandha for immuno-regulatory function in translational research.

The Directional Distance Function and Measurement of Super-Efficiency: An Application to Airlines Data

Lovell and Rouse (LR) have recently proposed a modification of the standard DEA model that overcomes the infeasibility problem often encountered in computing super-efficiency. In the LR procedure one appropriately scales up the observed input vector (scale down the output vector) of the relevant super-efficient firm thereby usually creating its inefficient surrogate. An alternative procedure proposed in this paper uses the directional distance function introduced by Chambers, Chung, and Färe and the resulting Nerlove-Luenberger (NL) measure of super-efficiency. The fact that the directional distance function combines features of both an input-oriented and an output-oriented model, generally leads to a more complete ranking of the observations than either of the oriented models. An added advantage of this approach is that the NL super-efficiency measure is unique and does not depend on any arbitrary choice of a scaling parameter. A data set on international airlines from Coelli, Perelman, and Griffel-Tatje (2002) is utilized in an illustrative empirical application.