Advances in intravesical drug delivery systems to treat bladder cancer

Chemotherapeutic agents administered intravesically to treat bladder cancer have limited efficacy due to periodic dilution and wash-out during urine formation and elimination. This review describes the pathophysiology, prevalence and staging of bladder cancer, and discusses several formulation strategies used to improve drug residence within the bladder. These include the use of amphiphilic copolymers, mucoadhesive formulations, hydrogels, floating systems, and liposomes. Various in vitro and in vivo models recently employed for intravesical drug delivery studies are discussed. Some of the challenges that have prevented the clinical use of some promising formulations are identified

Food grade polymers for the gelation of edible oils envisioning food applications

Oleogels are systems traditionally produced by the self-assembly of materials called gelators, which are responsible for inducing viscosity and solid-like capabilities to oil-based systems. The emergent interest concerning oil structuring strategies in food applications is related to oleogels' capacity to undergo structural and textural tailoring, and the possibility of their use in delivery of bioactive compounds.This research was supported by Norte Regional Operational Program 2014–2020 (Norte2020) through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Nanotechnology based functional solutions (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000019). This study was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145FEDER-006684) and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020—Programa Operacional Regional do Norte. The authors acknowledge the Project RECI/BBB-EBI/0179/2012 (FCOMP01-0124-FEDER-027462). Artur Martins is recipient of a fellowship supported by a doctoral advanced training (call NORTE- 69-2015-15) funded by the European Social Fund under the scope of Norte2020—Programa Operacional Regional do Norte.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

NMR spectroscopy for the determination of mucoadhesive properties of polysaccharides

Applications of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to the structural characterization of polysaccharides with mucoadhesive characteristics are described together with some limited cases of uses in the detection of affinity to mucin. Structural characterization spans from quantification of monomeric units of polysaccharides following degradation procedures till to the development of reliable analytical protocols directly on the intact polymeric materials. In these last cases several problems can be solved such as the identification of derivatization sites on monosaccharides units and determination of average length of derivatizing pendants. For non-covalent modifications, the more difficult aspect is the detection of conformational changes. Mucoadhesivity can be determined by exploiting the possibility to detect changes of affinity to mucin of small probe molecules due to the polysaccharide-mucin interaction