Nanoparticles: properties and applications in cancer immunotherapy

Background: Tumours are no longer regarded as isolated masses of aberrantly proliferating epithelial cells. Rather, their properties depend on complex interactions between epithelial cancer cells and the surrounding stromal compartment within the tumour microenvironment. In particular, leukocyte infiltration plays a role in controlling tumour development and is now considered one of the hallmarks of cancer. Thus, in the last few years, immunotherapy has become a promising strategy to fight cancer, as its goal is to reprogram or activate antitumour immunity to kill tumour cells, without damaging the normal cells and provide long-lasting results where other therapies fail. However, the immune-related adverse events due to the low specificity in tumour cell targeting, strongly limit immunotherapy efficacy. In this regard, nanomedicine offers a platform for the delivery of different immunotherapeutic agents specifically to the tumour site, thus increasing efficacy and reducing toxicity. Indeed, playing with different material types, several nanoparticles can be formulated with different shape, charge, size and surface chemical modifications making them the most promising platform for biomedical applications. Aim: In this review, we will summarize the different types of cancer immunotherapy currently in clinical trials or already approved for cancer treatment. Then, we will focus on the most recent promising strategies to deliver immunotherapies directly to the tumour site using nanoparticles. Conclusion: Nanomedicine seems to be a promising approach to improve the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy. However, additional investigations are needed to minimize the variables in the production processes in order to make nanoparticles suitable for clinical use

Structural equation model for the study of entrepreneurial education in an open platform

The overall goal of this paper is to provide a contribution to the studies that aim to boost the entrepreneurial education and the entrepreneurial activity of universities, through the analysis and implementation of the experimental lab, a tool to support to the activity of universities favouring entrepreneurship, and led by the belief that potentially implementable results have to be achieved. A new tool of a virtual platform, the ExperimentaLab, in order to provide students with an entrepreneurial training program and a strong network to simulate the progression from an idea to a real start-up. A first simulation was run in 2014, showing that the experimental lab could be effective at processing an idea and make it potentially ready for market and investors and a valid educational tool potentially implementable by entrepreneurial university. A second and a third simulation (ended on December 2015) were then run, trying to overcome previous limitations. This research aims to propose to investigate whether the hypothesized work structure of the ExperimentaLab and related cognitive dynamics may support the entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial activity of universities through a PLS-Path modeling approach and multi-group path analysis

Managerial insights from servitization literature: preliminary descriptive results from a content analysis

Servitization, meant as the addition of services to the product, is one of the most relevant phenomenon of the modern economy. Although the concept was described many years ago, only in the last decade, many authors, coming from different research streams, have been dealing with servitization. While literature is rich, it results quite fragmented, lacking in classifications of the mainstreams and of the practices and techniques useful to carry out servitization. Thus, the aim of this paper is to map and analyze the existing managerial literature on the servitization in order to identify its general characteristics and describe the managerial implications that it is possible to draw upon. The analysis of the literature was carried out through the content analysis technique