Promising Hydrogels-Based Dressings for Optimal Treatment of Cutaneous Lesions

Worldwide, cutaneous lesions care represents a daily challenge for the medical system, with an increasing prevalence from year to year (from ~5 million in 2005 to about 8 million in 2018) and high costs for their treatment (between ~$28 billion and ~$97 billion). Injuries are the most frequent and destructive form of skin damage, affecting patients’ quality of life. To promote wound healing, an ideal treatment involves proper dressings that can manage the local pain, inflammation, or infection. Passive or dry traditional dressings, such as cotton, gauze, or lint, have limited therapeutic actions and demand periodic replacement of the dressing. Therefore, an optimal alternative for advanced wound care is represented by hydrogels, one of the five classes of modern dressings, which assure excellent local moisture, due to their high ability to absorb a large volume of water inside their three-dimensional networks. Moreover, hydrogels possess suitable biocompatibility, biodegradability, porosity, elasticity, flexibility, and biological properties similar to the extracellular matrix. This chapter presents the main characteristics of the hydrogels and the recent research regarding the development of new hydrogel dressings, based on natural, semi-synthetic, or synthetic biopolymers, loaded with varied therapeutic agents to stimulate the tissue regeneration of different etiologies cutaneous lesions

Network analytics for drug repurposing in COVID-19

To better understand the potential of drug repurposing in COVID-19, we analyzed control strategies over essential host factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection. We constructed comprehensive directed protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks integrating the top-ranked host factors, the drug target proteins and directed PPI data. We analyzed the networks to identify drug targets and combinations thereof that offer efficient control over the host factors. We validated our findings against clinical studies data and bioinformatics studies. Our method offers a new insight into the molecular details of the disease and into potentially new therapy targets for it. Our approach for drug repurposing is significant beyond COVID-19 and may be applied also to other diseases.</p

Evaluation of some biotechnological parameters influencing the Pleurotus ostreatus biomass production by submerged cultivation

The submerged culture of mushrooms represents a future for biotechnological processes at industrial level, in order to obtain biomass with economical value (food and ingredients, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals). Pleurotus ostreatus is well known worldwide for its culinary and medicinal value. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the most important biotechnological parameters that have influence on the biomass production of P. ostreatus, by cultivation in submerged conditions. Applying the Plackett-Burman experimental design, the significant parameters influencing the P. ostreatus biomass production were found to be the concentration of dextrose and yeast extract and time of cultivation. The best results in terms of maximising the biomass production (25.71 g·L-1) were obtained when the “+1” level of each independent variables was used in the Plackett-Burman experimental design. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) exhibited a high correlation coefficient (R2) value of 0.9908, which certifies that the mathematical model was relevant for the biotechnological process

Synthesis, Characterization and Antimicrobial Activities of Some Schiff Bases with Non-Linear Optical Applications

Introduction: Schiff bases or imine compounds are considered a very remarkable category of organic compounds because of their π-delocalized structure and because of their pharmacological properties [...