Nanotechnology is a promising approach both for restoring or enhancing activity of old and conventional antimicrobial agents and for treating intracellular infections by providing intracellular targeting and sustained release of drug inside infected cells. The present paper introduces a formulation study of gentamicin loaded biodegradable nanoparticles (Nps). Solid-oil-in water technique was st...

In this work a continuum model for high frequency poroelastic longitudinal waves in hydrogels is presented. A viscoelastic force describing the interaction between the polymer network and the bounded water present in such materials is introduced. The model is tested by means of ultrasound wave speed and attenuation measurements in polyvinylalcohol hydrogel samples. The theory and experiments sh...

Drug-nanoparticle conjugates: The anticancer drug camptothecin (CPT) was covalently linked at the surface of ultrasmall superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (USPIOs) via a linker, allowing drug release by cellular esterases. Nanoparticles were hierarchically built to achieve magnetically-enhanced drug delivery to human cancer cells and antiproliferative activity.The linking of therapeutic...

Alternating current ~ac! and direct current ~dc! conductivities have been measured in polymer-nanotube composite thin films. This was carried out for a range of concentrations of multiwall nanotubes in two polymer hosts, poly~m-phenylenevinylene-co-2,5-dioctyloxyp-phenylenevinylene! ~PmPV! and polyvinylalcohol ~PVA!. In all cases the dc conductivity sDC was ohmic in the voltage range studied. I...

Thin polymer films are important in many areas of biomaterials research, biomedical devices, and biological sensors. The accurate in situ measurement of multiple physicochemical properties of thin polymer films is critical in understanding biocompatibility, polymer function, and performance. In this work we demonstrate a facile spectroscopic methodology for accurately measuring the micro-polari...

Alpha-Galactosidase production by the fungus Humicola lutea 120-5 immobilized in a hybrid sol-gel matrix, consisting of tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS) as a precursor and a mixture of polyethyleneglycol (PEG) and polyvinylalcohol (PVA), was investigated under semicontinuous shake flask cultivation and compared to the enzyme secretion by free cells. The influence of the carrier weight on the alph...

New generation biomaterials for bone regeneration should be highly bioactive, resorbable and mechanically strong. Mesoporous bioactive glass (MBG), a novel bioactive material, has been used to study bone regeneration due to its excellent bioactivity, degradation and drug delivery ability, however, the construction of three-dimensional (3-D) MBG scaffolds (as for other bioactive inorganic scaffo...