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Jiuzhou Liu,1,* Shasha Ren,2,* Xiangyu Zhang,3 Yun Feng,2 Zhenglun Qiu,2 Li Ma,4 Jingwen Huang4 1Department of Breast and Thyroid Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, 471003, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Breast and Thyroid Surgery, Luoyang Central Hospital Affiliated to Zhengzhou University, Luoyang, 471009, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Pathology, Jining First People’s Hospital, Jining Medical University, Jining, 272000, People’s Republic of China; 4The First Affiliated Hospital of Bengbu Medical College, Bengbu, 233004, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Jingwen Huang; Jiuzhou Liu Email byyfyhjw1988@163.com; Liu_JiuzhouBC@163.comBackground: Breast cancer (BC) is the most common type of cancer among women worldwide, and about 30% of males will have recurrent disease.Methods: In order to treat recurrent BC, we designed a type of silica nanodelivery system loaded with epirubicin and curcumin (composite nanoparticles, CNPs). To promote CNPs clinical application, the stability, the blood, immune and cell compatibility, skin stimulation experiments, anti-tumor activity in vivo and in vitro were studied.Results: In our study, the CNPs had a particle size of 73.9 nm and a uniform size and morphology; moreover, they maintained physical and chemical stability in the blood protein environment. Additionally, results showed that nanoparticles had good blood and immune compatibility, and they did not affect intracellular superoxide dismutase (SOD) and intracellular catalase (CAT). Skin stimulation experiments showed that CNPs did not cause any obvious irritative damage to the intact skin of rabbits. In the cytotoxicity study, CNPs showed strongest antitumor activity. The results of cell cycle and apoptosis studies showed that CNPs could mainly induce apoptosis of S and G2/M phase cells. In vivo, CNPs showed strongest aggregation in the tumor after 6 h of tail vein administration, and a large amount of CNPs continued to accumulate in the blood after 12 h of administration, indicating that CNPs had long circulation ability. The in vivo antitumor activities showed that CNPs had the strongest antitumor activity and tumor targeting ability, and hematoxylin-eosin staining of internal organs showed no obvious difference between treatment groups and negative control.Conclusion: CNPs have an ideal biosafety and therapeutic effect for recurrent BC, and they have potential clinical application value.Keywords: nanoparticles, breast cancer, chemotherapy, targeting, biocompatibility

Jintao Huang,1,* Chaoxi Wu,2,* Shunqing Tang,3 Pengjun Zhou,2 Jianping Deng,1 Zhen Zhang,1 Yifei Wang,2 Zhiping Wang1 1Guangdong Provincial Engineering Center of Topical Precise Drug Delivery System, School of Pharmacy, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, Guangzhou 510632, People’s Republic of China; 2Guangzhou Jinan Biomedicine Research and Development Center, Institute of Biomedicine, College of Life Science and Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, People’s Republic of China; 3Biomedical Engineering Institute, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Yifei Wang; Zhiping Wang Email twang-yf@163.com; wzping-jshb@gdpu.edu.cnBackground: β-glucans are chiral polysaccharides with well-defined immunological properties and supramolecular wrapping ability of its chiral feature. However, the exploitation of chiral properties of these nanoparticles in drug delivery systems was seldom conducted.Methods: β-glucan molecules with different chain lengths were extracted from yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and thereafter modified. In a conformation transition process, these β-glucan molecules were then self-assembled with anti-cancer drug doxorubicin into nanoparticles to construct drug delivery systems. The chiral interactions between the drug and carriers were revealed by circular dichroism spectra, ultraviolet and visible spectrum, fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering and transmission electron microscope. The immune-potentiation properties of modified β-glucan nanoparticles were evaluated by analysis of the mRNA expression in RAW264.7 cell model. Further, the antitumor efficacy of the nanoparticles against the human breast cancer were studied in MCF-7 cell model by cellular uptake and cytotoxicity experiments.Results: β-glucan nanoparticles can activate macrophages to produce immune enhancing cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, IFN-γ). A special chirality of the carriers in diameter of 50∼ 160 nm can also associate with higher drug loading ability of 13.9% ∼ 38.2% and pH-sensitive release with a change of pH from 7.4 to 5.0. Cellular uptake and cytotoxicity experiments also prove that the chiral-active β-glucan nanoparticles can be used in anti-cancer nanomedicine.Conclusion: This work demonstrates that β-glucans nanoparticles with special chiral feature which leading to strong immunopotentiation ability and high drug loading efficiency can be developed as a novel type of nanomedicine for anti-cancer treatment.Keywords: β-glucan, chiral, nanoparticles, doxorubicin, anti-cancer, drug delivery systems, immune-potentiation

We theoretically explore a type of bifunctional cloak possessing both electrical and thermal cloaking functionality. We employ a composite material to design the cloak shell. By using effective medium theory, the effective electrical and thermal conductivities of the composite material should meet the perfect conductivity profile calculated from the coordinate transformation approach. In the design, we choose nonspherical nanoparticles with appropriate electrical and thermal conductivities, shape aspects, and volume fractions. Furthermore, finite element simulations are performed to verify the properties of such bifunctional cloaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theoretically exploit a class of one-dimensional double-layer photonic crystals based on colloidal ferrofluids, which are made of ferromagnetic nanoparticles suspended in a carrier liquid. Depending on the magnetic-field-induced anisotropic property of the ferrofluid, precise controllability of the band gaps is demonstrated to be possible by applying an appropriate external magnetic field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit theoretically nonlinear optical materials by graded multilayered colloidal crystals, whose basic layer is made of metallodielectric nanoparticles immersed periodically in a host fluid. In the crystals, either the volume fraction of nanoparticles or the dielectric constant of host fluid can vary gradually within layers. The electric field distribution can be shown to exhibit a peak in a certain layer, and that the position of the peak can change by tuning the incident angular frequency. Such a gradation-controlled electric field distribution serves as a physical mechanism for understanding the enhanced nonlinear optical responses with a broad plasmon band. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors theoretically exploit a class of nonlinear optical materials, which are made of single domain ferromagnetic nanoparticles coated by a nonmagnetic nanoshell with an intrinsic second-harmonic generation (SHG) susceptibility in a nonmagnetic host fluid. The SHG of such materials possess magnetic-field controllabilities, i.e., magnetic-field-controllable anisotropy, redshift, and enhancement, which are caused to appear by the shift of a resonant plasmon frequency due to the formation of the chains of the coated nanoparticles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theoretically exploit a class of colloidal-crystal-based nonlinear optical materials, which are made of graded metallodielectric nanoparticles suspended in a host fluid. Such materials can have both an enhancement and a redshift of optical nonlinearity, due to the gradation inside the nanoparticles as well as the lattice effects arising from the periodic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]