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Diabetes mellitus is one of the key diseases of clinical concern that can lead to a variety of serious complications and it is characterized by increased blood glucose levels. Glucose‐sensitive hydrogel is gaining attention as a smart hydrogel capable of sensing glucose molecules for diabetes and related complications. In order to better understand this hydrogel, this paper reviews its basic design principles and focuses on the therapeutic efficacy of this hydrogel in delivering insulin, drugs, and bioactives for diabetes and diabetes‐related complications. Its use as a biosensing device for glucose measurement in body fluids and dynamic monitoring of wounds is also presented, and its potential application in the treatment of diabetes and related diseases is highly summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryogels are interlinked macroporous substrates or materials which have undergone processing from a monomeric solution below zero temperatures. Due to their exceptional features including biocompatibility, sensitivity, and physical inhibition, cryogels appear as injectable gels, powders, column, monolithic, beads, spheres, and membrane forms and are utilized in biomedical applications. Therefore, this paper elucidates recently emerging trends in cryogels structures for biomedical and pharmaceutical applications including drug delivery, cell transplantation, tissue engineering, therapeutic, immunotherapy, cell transplantation, and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize various fields of research and development. Multiple nanoparticles employed in a nanotechnology process are the magic elixir that provides unique features that are not present in the component's natural form. In the framework of contemporary research, it is inappropriate to synthesize microparticles employing procedures that include noxious elements. For this reason, scientists are investigating safer ways to produce genetically improved Cyanobacteria, which has many novel features and acts as a potential candidate for nanoparticle synthesis. In recent decades, cyanobacteria have garnered significant interest due to their prospective nanotechnological uses. This review will outline the applications of genetically engineered cyanobacteria in the field of nanotechnology and discuss its challenges and future potential. The evolution of cyanobacterial strains by genetic engineering is subsequently outlined. Furthermore, the recombination approaches that may be used to increase the industrial potential of cyanobacteria are discussed. This review provides an overview of the research undertaken to increase the commercial avenues of cyanobacteria and attempts to explain prospective topics for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnetic hydrogels (MHDG) are composites that are biocompatible, biodegradable, magnetically responsive, and characterized by type, concentration, geometry, and degree of uniformity of magnetic particulates, and hydrogels (HDG) used in fabrication. Nowadays, magnetically responsive smart hydrogels (MHDG) have been utilized in biomedicals and attainment of functional architectures. Furthermore, MHDG has been utilized as effective drug targeting and releasing tools. Hence, this paper gives brief insight into HDG evolution till the designing and development of MHDG; elaborates on MHDG relative to fundamental concepts concerning superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticulates, along with the fabrication and characterization of magneto-responsive HDG. Furthermore, critical uses of MHDG for drug conveyance, tissue engineering, cancer therapy, and environmental parameters are elucidated. This is capped with highlights on the challenges and future prospective of MHDG for 3-D and 4-D printing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polymeric nanocomposite hydrogels (PNHDGs) are water containing cross-linked polymeric hydrogel (HDG) networks combined with nanomaterials forming polymeric HDG nanoarchitectures with multifunctional properties suitable for versatile applications especially in biomedicals, drug delivery systems (DDSs), tissue engineering (TE), and implantable materials because of their inherently high biocompatibility and high water composition, similar to that of the human system. In this paper recent advances in varying biomedical HDG, especially, nanocomposite HDG, conductive HDG, as well as multiple network HDG are presented. When compared with conventional HDG, these advanced HDG nanoarchitectures demonstrate significant enhancement in architecture, mechanical behaviors, and applications while surpassing the factors limiting the efficiency and scope of application of HDG. Therefore, this paper elucidates recently emerging trends in vary approaches of fabricating nanocomposite HDG and applications, especially in biomedicals and pharmaceuticals.

In the present study, Pelargonium sidoides (PS) extract was used in the green synthesis of AuNPs that was characterized by UV-Vis, TEM, SAED, EDS, XRD, FTIR, and DLS. UV-Vis showed a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) at 'max of 532 nm while TEM shows that the particles are predominantly spherical and monodispersed. DLS measurement indicated the particle size and the zeta potential to be 27.20 nm and -24.0 mV respectively. The in vitro stability of the hybrid particles in different solutions and buffers (pH 7 and 9) confirmed that the particles are stable over a given period. The method employed is simple, environmentally friendly, and inexpensive. Our studies suggest that the Pelargonium sidoides-gold nanoparticles (PS-AuNPs) may be safely used in biomedical applications such as drug delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As people across the world live longer, chronic illness and diminished well-being are becoming major global public health challenges. Marine biotechnology may help overcome some of these challenges by developing new products and know-how derived from marine organisms. While some products from marine organisms such as microalgae, sponges, and fish have already found biotechnological applications, jellyfish have received little attention as a potential source of bioactive compounds. Nevertheless, recent studies have highlighted that scyphomedusae (Cnidaria, Scyphozoa) synthesise at least three main categories of compounds that may find biotechnological applications: collagen, fatty acids and components of crude venom. We review what is known about these compounds in scyphomedusae and their current biotechnological applications, which falls mainly into four categories of products: nutraceuticals, cosmeceuticals, biomedicals, and biomaterials. By defining the state of the art of biotechnological applications in scyphomedusae, we intend to promote the use of these bioactive compounds to increase the health and well-being of future societies.

Functionalizations of poly(vinyl alcohol) congruent with the desired applications are discussed inthis article. The chemical modifications of poly(vinyl alcohol) with different molecular weights and hydrolysis degrees via conventional chemistries, namely esterification, carbamation, and etherification, and via the modern ones such as click chemistry, led to finished materials with a wide range of applications and uses: membrane fuel cells, biologicals and biomedicals, adsorption of heavy metals and other contaminants, molecular sensing or chemosensor for detection of some useful molecules or toxic ones, separation of mixtures, and catalysis in organic and inorganic syntheses. Different forms of the duly modified poly(vinyl alcohol)s were used in such applications, including hydrogels, films, membranes, and nanoparticles. The incorporated modifying agents onto poly(vinyl alcohol) matrixes brought some changes that were in tune with the projected applications. These modifying agents were not confined to molecular compounds but also to macromolecular ones which are graphene, hyaluronic acid, β-cylcodextrin, polystyrene, poly(4-vinylpyridine), and poly(L-lactic acid). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Semantic similarity measures estimate the similarity between concepts, and play an important role in many text processing tasks. Approaches to semantic similarity in the biomedical domain can be roughly divided into knowledge based and distributional based methods. Knowledge based approaches utilize knowledge sources such as dictionaries, taxonomies, and semantic networks, and include path finding measures and intrinsic information content (IC) measures. Distributional measures utilize, in addition to a knowledge source, the distribution of concepts within a corpus to compute similarity; these include corpus IC and context vector methods. Prior evaluations of these measures in the biomedical domain showed that distributional measures outperform knowledge based path finding methods; but more recent studies suggested that intrinsic IC based measures exceed the accuracy of distributional approaches. Limitations of previous evaluations of similarity measures in the biomedical domain include their focus on the SNOMED CT ontology, and their reliance on small benchmarks not powered to detect significant differences between measure accuracy. There have been few evaluations of the relative performance of these measures on other biomedical knowledge sources such as the UMLS, and on larger, recently developed semantic similarity benchmarks. Results: We evaluated knowledge based and corpus IC based semantic similarity measures derived from SNOMED CT, MeSH, and the UMLS on recently developed semantic similarity benchmarks. Semantic similarity measures based on the UMLS, which contains SNOMED CT and MeSH, significantly outperformed those based solely on SNOMED CT or MeSH across evaluations. Intrinsic IC based measures significantly outperformed path-based and distributional measures. We released all code required to reproduce our results and all tools developed as part of this study as open source, available under http://code.google.com/p/ytex. We provide a publicly-accessible web service to compute semantic similarity, available under http://informatics.med.yale.edu/ytex.web/.Conclusions: Knowledge based semantic similarity measures are more practical to compute than distributionalmeasures, as they do not require an external corpus. Furthermore, knowledge based measures significantly and meaningfully outperformed distributional measures on large semantic similarity benchmarks, suggesting that they are a practical alternative to distributional measures. Future evaluations of semantic similarity measures should utilize benchmarks powered to detect significant differences in measure accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Evolvement of electrohydrodynamic direct-writing (EHDDW) technology is introduced. • Basic principle, typical apparatus, commonly used materials and controlling parameters during the directing process are discussed. • Latest advances of EHDDW applications in fabricating smart materials, electronics and biomedicals are overviewed. • Remaining challenges and perspectives towards EHDDW are summarized and outlooked. Fibers, having a large aspect ratio, have become an essential material in human life since the dawn of civilization. Lots of efforts have been made in controlling the fine structure and architecture of fibers for diverse applications. However, great technological challenges remain on patterning fibers with diameters down to tens of nanometers into the desired structure through conventional methods. Electro-hydrodynamic direct-writing (EHDDW) technology shows great potential in depositing the highly aligned micro/nanofibers in a noncontact, direct, and controllable manner which can achieve a real-time adjustment and individually accurate control even on flexible, curved substrates. In this review, beginning with a brief introduction to the history of EHDDW, we first discuss its basic principle and typical apparatus. We continue with a highlight of its rise over the past decades as a powerful technology for the production of nanofibers with versatile compositions and structures. Afterward, we summarize the applications of such "controlled" nanofibers, including their uses as "smart" wearables, energy harvesting/conversion/storage components, and biomedical scaffolds. In the end, we discuss the opportunities and the development directions for this promising area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As people across the world live longer, chronic illness and diminished well-being are becoming major global public health challenges. Marine biotechnology may help overcome some of these challenges by developing new products and know-how derived from marine organisms. While some products from marine organisms such as microalgae, sponges, and fish have already found biotechnological applications, jellyfish have received little attention as a potential source of bioactive compounds. Nevertheless, recent studies have highlighted that scyphomedusae (Cnidaria, Scyphozoa) synthesise at least three main categories of compounds that may find biotechnological applications: collagen, fatty acids and components of crude venom. We review what is known about these compounds in scyphomedusae and their current biotechnological applications, which falls mainly into four categories of products: nutraceuticals, cosmeceuticals, biomedicals, and biomaterials. By defining the state of the art of biotechnological applications in scyphomedusae, we intend to promote the use of these bioactive compounds to increase the health and well-being of future societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]