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The role of endovascular interventions has progressed rapidly over the past several decades. While animal models have long-served as the mainstay for the advancement of this field, the use of in vitro models has become increasingly widely adopted with recent advances in engineering technologies. Here, we review the strategies, mainly including bioprinting and microfabrication, which allow for fabrication of biomimetic vascular models that will potentially serve to supplement the conventional animal models for convenient investigations of endovascular interventions. Besides normal blood vessels, those in diseased states, such as thrombosis, may also be modeled by integrating cues that simulate the microenvironment of vascular disorders. These novel engineering strategies for the development of biomimetic in vitro vascular structures will possibly enable unconventional means of studying complex endovascular intervention problems that are otherwise hard to address using existing models., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.net.)

Tea polyphenols have received much attention from the pharmaceutical and food industries owing to their extraordinary antioxidant and antibacterial characteristics. However, tea polyphenols are very unstable in processing and storage, since they are sensitive to the environmental factors like temperature, light and pH. Therefore, the effective application of tea polyphenols requires a protective mechanism to maintain its activity. The utilization of compounded tea polyphenols, instead of raw materials, can potentially help to improve their stability. This review focuses on the summarization of the compounding technologies for tea polyphenols, including physical technologies, chemical-interfacial technologies and nano-scale compounding technologies. Of which, the emerging nano cellulose bio-carrier, as a promising technology, is particularly proposed., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.org.)

Cellulose is an important environmentally-friendly renewable polymer on the earth. Cellulose has been widely used as feedstocks for the synthesis of biomaterials, biofuels and biochemicals. Recently, cellulose and cellulose derivatives have received intense attention in biomedical applications, such as tissue engineering, scaffold, artificial blood vessel, skin grafts, artificial skin, drug carrier, and chronic skin diseases, many of which are somehow related to cancer therapy. In this mini-review, we focus on the up-to-date development of cellulosebased nanocarriers used for cancer therapy. Various cellulose-based nanocarriers such as bacterial cellulose (BC), cellulose acetate, microcrystalline cellulose, carboxymethyl cellulose, cellulose nanocrystals, cellulose nanofibrills, etc, are reviewed in terms of being used in drug delivery systems for cancer treatment. Different strategies for the synthesis of cellulose-based nanocarriers are summarized. Special attention is paid on the structure and properties of cellulose-based drug carriers for cancer therapy via some representative examples. Finally, the problems and future developments of these promising polymeric nanocarriers are raised and proposed., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.org.)

Ultrasound contrast agents (UCA) represented by gas-filled microbubble, can provide simultaneous and co-localized enhancement on image contrast to help disease diagnosis by highlighting tissue borders. Nowadays, Some UCAs (e.g. Levovist®, Optison®, Definity®, and Sonovue®) are commercially available, and have been clinically utilized for enhanced ultrasonography in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia and so on. However, their large diameters (1~10 µm) mainly hinder more precise and deeper applications in the imaging of capillaryabundant organs or tissues (e.g. tumor), and undersized nanoscale UCAs also lack enough backscattering echo intensity to distinguish abnormal distribution of vessels. So novel shapes, structures and materials of nano-sized UCAs are constantly emerging for cancer ultrasonic imaging. Particularly, the cavitation effect of diagnostic ultrasound can accelerate effusion of loaded contents from UCAs, following cellular uptake. This will inevitably contribute to develop other potential applications of nano-sized UCAs towards cancer therapy and theranostics., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.org.)