Triazolylidenes have rapidly emerged as a powerful subclass of N-heterocyclic carbene ligands for transition metals. They are readily available through regioselective 2 + 3 cycloaddition of alkynes ...and azides and subsequent metallation according to procedures established for related carbenes. Due to their mesoionic character, triazolylidenes are stronger donors than Arduengo-type imidazol-2-ylidenes. Spurred by these attractive attributes and despite their only recent emergence, triazolylidenes have shown major implications in catalysis. This feature article summarises the synthetic accessibility of triazolylidene metal complexes and their electronic and structural characteristics, and it compiles their applications, in particular, as catalyst precursors for various bond forming and redox reactions, as well as first approaches into photophysical and biochemical domains.
Triazolylidenes have rapidly emerged as a powerful subclass of N-heterocyclic carbene ligands for transition metals.
The oral route is a popular and convenient means of drug delivery. However, despite its advantages, it also has challenges. Many drugs are not suitable for oral delivery due to: first pass ...metabolism; less than ideal properties; and side-effects of treatment. Additionally, oral delivery relies heavily on patient compliance. Implantable drug delivery devices are an alternative system that can achieve effective delivery with lower drug concentrations, and as a result, minimise side-effects whilst increasing patient compliance. This article gives an overview of classification of these drug delivery devices; the mechanism of drug release; the materials used for manufacture; the various methods of manufacture; and examples of clinical applications of implantable drug delivery devices.
Display omitted
Microneedles (MN) have the potential to become a highly progressive device for both drug delivery and monitoring purposes as they penetrate the skin and pierce the stratum corneum ...barrier, allowing the delivery of drugs in the viable skin layers and the extraction of body fluids. Despite the many years of research and the different types of MN developed, only hollow MN have reached the pharmaceutical market under the path of medical devices. Therefore, this review focuses on hollow MN, materials and methods for their fabrication as well as their application in drug delivery, vaccine delivery and monitoring purposes. Furthermore, novel approaches for the fabrication of hollow MN are included as well as prospects of microneedle-based products on the market.
The skin offers an accessible and convenient site for the administration of medications. To this end, the field of transdermal drug delivery, aimed at developing safe and efficacious means of ...delivering medications across the skin, has in the past and continues to garner much time and investment with the continuous advancement of new and innovative approaches. This review details the progress and current status of the transdermal drug delivery field and describes numerous pharmaceutical developments which have been employed to overcome limitations associated with skin delivery systems. Advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches are detailed, commercially marketed products are highlighted and particular attention is paid to the emerging field of microneedle technologies.
We describe, for the first time the use of hydrogel-forming microneedle (MN) arrays for minimally-invasive extraction and quantification of drug substances and glucose from skin in vitro and in vivo. ...MN prepared from aqueous blends of hydrolysed poly(methyl-vinylether-co-maleic anhydride) (11.1% w/w) and poly(ethyleneglycol) 10,000 daltons (5.6% w/w) and crosslinked by esterification swelled upon skin insertion by uptake of fluid. Post-removal, theophylline and caffeine were extracted from MN and determined using HPLC, with glucose quantified using a proprietary kit. In vitro studies using excised neonatal porcine skin bathed on the underside by physiologically-relevant analyte concentrations showed rapid (5 min) analyte uptake. For example, mean concentrations of 0.16 μg/mL and 0.85 μg/mL, respectively, were detected for the lowest (5 μg/mL) and highest (35 μg/mL) Franz cell concentrations of theophylline after 5 min insertion. A mean concentration of 0.10 μg/mL was obtained by extraction of MN inserted for 5 min into skin bathed with 5 μg/mL caffeine, while the mean concentration obtained by extraction of MN inserted into skin bathed with 15 μg/mL caffeine was 0.33 μg/mL. The mean detected glucose concentration after 5 min insertion into skin bathed with 4 mmol/L was 19.46 nmol/L. The highest theophylline concentration detected following extraction from a hydrogel-forming MN inserted for 1 h into the skin of a rat dosed orally with 10 mg/kg was of 0.363 μg/mL, whilst a maximum concentration of 0.063 μg/mL was detected following extraction from a MN inserted for 1 h into the skin of a rat dosed with 5 mg/kg theophylline. In human volunteers, the highest mean concentration of caffeine detected using MN was 91.31 μg/mL over the period from 1 to 2 h post-consumption of 100 mg Proplus® tablets. The highest mean blood glucose level was 7.89 nmol/L detected 1 h following ingestion of 75 g of glucose, while the highest mean glucose concentration extracted from MN was 4.29 nmol/L, detected after 3 hours skin insertion in human volunteers. Whilst not directly correlated, concentrations extracted from MN were clearly indicative of trends in blood in both rats and human volunteers. This work strongly illustrates the potential of hydrogel-forming MN in minimally-invasive patient monitoring and diagnosis. Further studies are now ongoing to reduce clinical insertion times and develop mathematical algorithms enabling determination of blood levels directly from MN measurements.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Microneedles (MN) offer a simple, minimally invasive and reduced pain alternative to hypodermic needles for drug delivery, including vaccines. Previous studies investigating the use of MN have ...highlighted the benefit of this technology to facilitate dermal and transdermal drug delivery. Going forward towards commercialization, it is important to consider the perceptions and acceptability that MN technology will have once available in the market. This review collects the opinions and expectations of different population groups such as children, parents, paediatricians and the general public on various MN systems. In addition, the low pain perception scores, based on a visual analog scale for MN application, should also lead to a greater acceptability of this technology as a means of transdermal drug delivery. This review also highlights the potential challenges associated with the different types of MN together with issues of sterility and biocompatibility which will be important future factors to consider.
Hydrogels have been shown to be very useful in the field of drug delivery due to their high biocompatibility and ability to sustain delivery. Therefore, the tuning of their properties should be the ...focus of study to optimise their potential. Hydrogels have been generally limited to the delivery of hydrophilic drugs. However, as many of the new drugs coming to market are hydrophobic in nature, new approaches for integrating hydrophobic drugs into hydrogels should be developed. This article discusses the possible new ways to incorporate hydrophobic drugs within hydrogel structures that have been developed through research. This review describes hydrogel-based systems for hydrophobic compound delivery included in the literature. The section covers all the main types of hydrogels, including physical hydrogels and chemical hydrogels. Additionally, reported applications of these hydrogels are described in the subsequent sections.
The presence of bacterial biofilms in wounds is a main issue in the healing process. Conventional therapy of bacterial biofilms is hampered by the poor penetration of antibacterial agents through the ...physical barrier on the infected skin and the non-specific target of antibacterial agents. Here, we present a combination approach of bacterial sensitive nanoparticles (NPs) and dissolving microneedles (MNs) of doxycycline (DOX) for improved biofilm penetration and specifically delivering DOX to the infection site. The NPs were prepared from poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) and poly (Ɛ-caprolactone) decorated with chitosan. The release of DOX was improved with the presence of bacterial producing biofilm up to 7-fold. The incorporation of these NPs into dissolving MNs was able to significantly enhance the dermatokinetic profiles of DOX, indicated by higher retention time compared to needle-free patches. Importantly, the antibiofilm activity in ex vivo biofilm model showed that after 48 h, the bacterial bioburdens decreased up to 99.99% following the application of this approach. The results presented here assist as proof of principle for the improvement of dermatokinetic profiles and antibiofilm activities of DOX, following its formulation into bacterial sensitive NPs and delivery via MN. Future studies must explore in vivo efficacy in a suitable animal model.
Display omitted
Unique microneedle arrays prepared from crosslinked polymers, which contain no drug themselves, are described. They rapidly take up skin interstitial fluid upon skin insertion to form continuous, ...unblockable, hydrogel conduits from attached patch‐type drug reservoirs to the dermal microcirculation. Importantly, such microneedles, which can be fabricated in a wide range of patch sizes and microneedle geometries, can be easily sterilized, resist hole closure while in place, and are removed completely intact from the skin. Delivery of macromolecules is no longer limited to what can be loaded into the microneedles themselves and transdermal drug delivery is now controlled by the crosslink density of the hydrogel system rather than the stratum corneum, while electrically modulated delivery is also a unique feature. This technology has the potential to overcome the limitations of conventional microneedle designs and greatly increase the range of the type of drug that is deliverable transdermally, with ensuing benefits for industry, healthcare providers and, ultimately, patients.
Microneedle arrays prepared from crosslinked polymers, which contain no drug themselves, are described. They rapidly take up skin interstitial fluid upon skin insertion to form continuous, unblockable, hydrogel conduits from attached patch‐type drug reservoirs to the dermal microcirculation. This technology has the potential to further enhance the capabilities of microneedle strategies for transdermal drug delivery, while bypassing current difficulties.
We show that occupancy models are more difficult to fit than is generally appreciated because the estimating equations often have multiple solutions, including boundary estimates which produce fitted ...probabilities of zero or one. The estimates are unstable when the data are sparse, making them difficult to interpret, and, even in ideal situations, highly variable. As a consequence, making accurate inference is difficult. When abundance varies over sites (which is the general rule in ecology because we expect spatial variance in abundance) and detection depends on abundance, the standard analysis suffers bias (attenuation in detection, biased estimates of occupancy and potentially finding misleading relationships between occupancy and other covariates), asymmetric sampling distributions, and slow convergence of the sampling distributions to normality. The key result of this paper is that the biases are of similar magnitude to those obtained when we ignore non-detection entirely. The fact that abundance is subject to detection error and hence is not directly observable, means that we cannot tell when bias is present (or, equivalently, how large it is) and we cannot adjust for it. This implies that we cannot tell which fit is better: the fit from the occupancy model or the fit ignoring the possibility of detection error. Therefore trying to adjust occupancy models for non-detection can be as misleading as ignoring non-detection completely. Ignoring non-detection can actually be better than trying to adjust for it.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK