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To mitigate side effects in systemic administration, anticancer drugs are encapuslated in nanocontainers. The nanocontainers are impermeable through normal vessel walls but can permeate and retain in the tumor, albeit their diffusive transport in the tumor interstitium towards pharmacological targets is drastically hindered by the tumor microenvironment resulting in a compromised therapeutic efficacy. We introduce a new drug delivery concept, which relies on drug container passive accumulation in the tumor vasculature followed by an hours-scale release of small-molecule payload that cross the capillary walls to the tumor interstitium and permeates the tumor parenchyma. To demonstrate this approach, a colloidal solution of geology-inspired sub-micron vaterite particles (VPs) loaded with photosensitiser drug porphyrazine was used to deliver and visualise porphyrazine biodistribution in the tumors in vivo . The tumor uptake of polyethylene-glycol-coated gold nanorods and porphyrazine was enhanced c.a 4-fold and 1.8-fold, respectively, when formulated in VP containers. The tumor uptake of similar to 30%ID/g much higher than the field average was achieved and enabled successful photodynamic therapy.

We demonstrate tomographic imaging of the refractive index of turbid media using bifocal optical coherence refractometry (BOCR). The technique, which is a variant of optical coherence tomography, is based on the measurement of the optical pathlength difference between two foci simultaneously present in a medium of interest. We describe a new method to axially shift the bifocal optical pathlength that avoids the need to physically relocate the objective lens or the sample during an axial scan, and present an experimental realization based on an adaptive liquid-crystal lens. We present experimental results, including video clips, which demonstrate refractive index tomography of a range of turbid liquid phantoms, as well as of human skin in vivo.

We study the influence of a boundary point contact voltage on Coulomb blockadelike oscillations of the conductance in mesoscopic quantum wires of strongly correlated electrons. Bethe ansatz techniques allow one to understand lattice boundary effects together with nonconformal many-body behavior for such systems. We predict a nonlinear dependence of the initial (coherent) shift on oscillations with boundary potentials. The results are obtained for both spinless and spin cases.