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Celastrol (CL), a bioactive compound isolated from Tripterygium wilfordii, has demonstrated bioactivities against a variety of diseases including cancer and obesity. However, its poor water solubility and rapid in vivo clearance limit its clinical applications. To overcome these limitations, nanotechnology has been employed to improve its pharmacokinetic properties. Nanoparticles made of biological materials offer minimal adverse effects while maintaining the efficacy of encapsulated therapeutics. Silk fibroin (SF) solution was prepared successfully by extraction from the cocoons of silkworms, and a final concentration of 2 mg/mL SF solution was used for the preparation of CL-loaded SF nanoparticles (CL-SFNP) by the desolvation method. A stirring speed of 750 rpm and storage time of 20 h at &minus, 20 &deg, C resulted in optimized product yield. A high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was developed and validated for the analysis of CL in rat plasma in terms of selectivity, linearity, intra-/inter-day precision and accuracy, and recovery. No interference was observed in rat plasma. Linearity in the concentration range of 0.05&ndash, 5 &micro, g/mL was observed with R2 of 0.999. Precision and accuracy values were below the limit of acceptance criteria, i.e., 15% for quality control (QC) samples and 20% for lower limit of quantification (LLOQ) samples. Rats were given intravenous (IV) administration of 1 mg/kg of pure CL in PEG 300 solution or CL-SFNP. The pharmacokinetic profile was improved with CL-SFNP compared to pure CL. Pure CL resulted in a maximum concentration (Cmax) value of 0.17 &micro, g mL&minus, 1 at 5 min following administration, whereas that for CL-SFNP was 0.87 &micro, 1 and the extrapolated initial concentrations (C0) were 0.25 and 1.09 &micro, 1, respectively, for pure CL and CL-SFNP. A 2.4-fold increase in total area under the curve (AUC0-inf) (&micro, g h mL&minus, 1) was observed with CL-SFNP when compared with pure CL. CL-SFNP demonstrated longer mean residence time (MRT, 0.67 h) than pure CL (0.26 h). In conclusion, the preparation of CL-SFNP was optimized and the formulation demonstrated improved pharmacokinetic properties compared to CL in solution following IV administration.

This chapter presents a review on the wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) system and proposes a list of new features that are desired in the next generation Internet of Things (IoT)-based WCE system. As an intelligent device, it comprises of various sensors including on-chip image and color sensors, and physiological sensors like pH, temperature, and pressure which will offer a quick and accurate diagnostic tool to detect gastrointestinal abnormalities. Data-processing steps like filtering, noise cancellation, and amplification are applied to improve accuracy. The data is then transmitted to the data logger using radiofrequency technology for offline processing and diagnosis. Integrating IoT will offer real-time decision-making and more control over capsule functionality. We will also analyze the limitations of the current WCE technology and present an IoT-based WCE device that will improve both the accuracy and reliability of the system.

Pancreatic cancer is a lethal disease with a dreadful 5-year survival rate of only 5%. In spite of several treatment options, the prognosis still remains extremely poor. Therefore, novel therapy strategies with combinations of drugs are urgently required to combat this fatal disease. Triptolide (TPL) and celastrol (CL), two main compounds in traditional Chinese medicine isolated from Thunder God Vine, have a broad range of bioactivities including anticancer activity. Silk fibroin (SF), a naturally occurring protein with several unique properties, is an ideal carrier material. In this study, we prepared TPL and CL loaded silk fibroin nanoparticles (TPL-SFNPs and CL-SFNPs) by a modified desolvation method and evaluated their synergistic effects against human pancreatic cancer cells. Both SFNPs were characterized for particle size and zeta potential. The entrapment efficiency, drug loading, and drug release profiles were evaluated by HPLC. The cytotoxicity and synergistic effect of SFNPs were investigated in MIA PaCa-2 and PANC-1 human pancreatic cells. The results showed that the particle sizes of TPL-SFNPs and CL-SFNPs were 166.4 ± 4.6 nm and 170.4 ± 2.3 nm, with a mean zeta potential -27.2 ± 2.0 mV and -25.5 ± 2.57 mV, respectively. TPL-SFNPs and CL-SFNPs have a drug loading of 57.0 ± 4.7 μg mg-1 and 63.5 ± 3.8 μg mg-1 along with an encapsulation efficiency of 81.8 ± 2.8% and 87.0 ± 5.1%, respectively. Drug release studies revealed that a rapid release of the drugs from SFNPs was observed at pH 4.5 (lysosomal pH) and a delayed release was observed at pH 7.4 (plasma pH). TPL-SFNPs (IC50 3.80 and 4.75 nM) and CL-SFNPs (IC50 0.38 and 0.64 μM) were 2-3 fold more potent against MIA PaCa-2 and PANC-1 cells than free TPL (IC50 11.25 and 11.58 nM) and CL (IC50 0.84 and 1.23 μM). Furthermore, co-treatment with TPL-SFNPs and CL-SFNPs increased the growth inhibition of the same cells significantly in comparison with TPL-SFNPs or CL-SFNPs alone. Almost all combination index (CI) values, calculated using the CompuSyn software, were

The aim of the current study was to evaluate the antioxidant, antimicrobial and thrombolytic potentials of the exocarp of Spondias pinnata fruits. The crude ethanolic extract of the exocarp of S. pinnata fruit was partitioned successively by solvents of different polarity. All fractions were then investigated for qualitative preliminary phytochemical screening by specific standard procedure. The antioxidant potential of all fractions were then evaluated in terms of total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, DPPH free radical scavenging potential, reducing potential and total antioxidant capacity by specific standard procedure. The disc diffusion method was incorporated to evaluate the in vitro antimicrobial activity on nutrient agar medium. The highest total phenolic content was found in aqueous fraction (570.20±0.48 mg GAE/g of dried extract) while the lowest in the n-Hexane fraction (337.51±0.21 mg GAE/g of dried extract). However, ethyl acetate fraction exhibited the highest flavonoid content which amounted to 132.27±0.25 mg quercetin equivalents/g of dried extract. Likewise, ethyl acetate fraction showed the highest antioxidant capacity (21.61±0.11 g of L-ascorbic acid equivalents/g of dried extract) along with the lowest IC50 (1.72±0.39 µg/ml) & EC50 (2.25±0.75 µg/ml) value. However, DPPH free radical scavenging activity and reducing power of all fractions were found to be concentration dependent. Nonetheless, comparatively more polar fractions (ethyl acetate and aqueous fraction) were found to be ineffective against all the microbial strains except S. dysentery and P. aeruginosa while non- polar fractions (n-hexane and dichloromethane fraction) showed variable antimicrobial activity. In addition, all fractions produced statistically significant (P

To investigate the antioxidant, antimicrobial, cytotoxic and thrombolytic property of the fruits and leaves of Spondias dulcis (S. dulcis).Methanolic extracts of fruits and leaves of S. dulcis were partitioned with chloroform and dichloromethane. The antioxidant potential of the crude extract and partitioned fractions were evaluated in terms of total phenolic content, total flavonoid content, DPPH radical scavenging potential, reducing potential and total antioxidant capacity by specific standard procedures. The antimicrobial activity was evaluated using disc diffusion method. The cytotoxicity was evaluated by using brine shrimp lethality bioassay and compared with vincristine sulfate. The thrombolytic activity was compared with streptokinase.The methanolic fruit extract exhibited the highest phenolic content, flavonoid content and antioxidant capacity, among the other extracts, with the highest DPPH radical scavenging activity at a concentration of 10 µg/mL (IC50: 1.91 µg/mL) and maximum reducing power at a concentration of 100 µg/mL (EC50: 3.58 µg/mL). Though all extract showed moderate antimicrobial activity against the bacterial strains, weak or no activity against fungus. The range of LC50 value of all extracts was 1.335-14.057 µg/mL which was far lower than the cut off index for cytotoxicity. All extracts exhibited statistically significant (P0.001) thrombolytic activity.Our study suggested that S. dulcis exhibits antimicrobial activities against a wide variety of strains while it possesses significant antioxidant, cytotoxic and thrombolytic activity.

The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) has extensively been used in a wide range of applications, including numerical analysis, image and video coding, pattern recognition, medical and telemetric imaging, etc. The invention of DWT decomposition by Mallat (Mallat, 1998) shows that the DWT can be viewed as a multiresolution decomposition of signal. This means it decomposes the signal into its components in different frequency bands. The Inverse DWT does the opposite, i.e. it reconstructs the signal from its octave band components. After its inclusion in JPEG2000 compression standard (Seo & Kim, 2007), significant research has been done to optimize the DWT implementation to reduce the computational complexity. Among a wide range of wavelets, the Daubechies wavelets include members ranging from highly localized to highly smooth and can provide excellent performance in image compression (Daubechies, 1992). Among the family members, the first two – Daubechies 4-tap (DAUB4) and Daubechies 6-tap (DAUB6) – are popular choices in medical imaging applications. While compressing medical images, the key here is to preserve as much critical information as possible in the reconstructed image so that accurate diagnosis is possible. There have been several efficient implementations of wavelet filters proposed for applications in image processing (Lee & Lim, 2006; Martina & Masera, 2007; Acharyya et al., 2009; Shi et al., 2009; Lai et al., 2009). But, the use of conventional fixed-point (FP) binary (or any other weighted) representation for implementing discrete wavelet coefficients (that are irrational in nature) introduces round-off or approximation errors at the very beginning of the process. The error is due to the lack of exact representation of the irrational numbers that form the coefficient basis. These errors tend to expand as the calculations progress through the architecture, degrading the quality of image reconstruction (Wahid et al., 2003). A lossless mapping technique, known as Algebraic Integer Quantization (AIQ), can be used to minimize the approximation error and efficiently compute the DAUB4 and DAUB6 coefficients (Wahid et al., 2004). The AIQ scheme is divided into two parts: the first stage is based on factorization and decomposition of transform matrices exploiting the symmetric structure. After the decomposition, we map the irrational transform basis coefficients using multidimensional algebraic integers that results in exact representation and simpler implementation. As a result, less error is introduced in the computation process that yields significantly better