Capsaicin Nanoparticles as Therapeutic Agents against Gliomas

Capsaicin is an alkaloid molecule with outstanding biological activity. Several reports have shown that capsaicin exerts significant antitumoral effects in several cancer cell lines, including gliomas. However, its application has been very limited due to its hydrophobicity, low affinity, and short life span. Gliomas are a heterogeneous group of brain malignant tumors with increasing prevalence worldwide. Standard therapy against these tumors generally includes resection by surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy or their combination. However, elicitation of tumor resistance to chemical or radiation treatments remains one of the main challenges to be resolved, particularly in the case of glioblastomas. Nanotechnology is an innovative approach to the treatment of Central Nervous System diseases and especially to gliomas treatment. Indeed, the use of nanotherapeutic formulations offers several advantages over the conventional methods of drug delivery therapy. In this review, we analyzed the current literature regarding the development of capsaicin-loaded nanoparticles as a promising approach for the treatment of malignant brain tumors

Mesoscopic Modeling of the Encapsulation of Capsaicin by Lecithin/Chitosan Liposomal Nanoparticles

The transport of hydrophobic drugs in the human body exhibits complications due to the low solubility of these compounds. With the purpose of enhancing the bioavailability and biodistribution of such drugs, recent studies have reported the use of amphiphilic molecules, such as phospholipids, for the synthesis of nanoparticles or nanocapsules. Given that phospholipids can self-assemble in liposomes or micellar structures, they are ideal candidates to function as vehicles of hydrophobic molecules. In this work, we report mesoscopic simulations of nanoliposomes, constituted by lecithin and coated with a shell of chitosan. The stability of such structures and the efficiency of the encapsulation of capsaicin, as well as the internal and superficial distribution of capsaicin and chitosan inside the nanoliposome, were analyzed. The characterization of the system was carried out through density maps and the potentials of mean force for the lecithin-capsaicin, lecithin-chitosan, and capsaicin-chitosan interactions. The results of these simulations show that chitosan is deposited on the surface of the nanoliposome, as has been reported in some experimental works. It was also observed that a nanoliposome of approximately 18 nm in diameter is stable during the simulation. The deposition behavior was found to be influenced by a pattern of N-acetylation of chitosan

Equivalent Circuits Applied in Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy and Fractional Derivatives with and without Singular Kernel

We present an alternative representation of integer and fractional electrical elements in the Laplace domain for modeling electrochemical systems represented by equivalent electrical circuits. The fractional derivatives considered are of Caputo and Caputo-Fabrizio type. This representation includes distributed elements of the Cole model type. In addition to maintaining consistency in adjusted electrical parameters, a detailed methodology is proposed to build the equivalent circuits. Illustrative examples are given and the Nyquist and Bode graphs are obtained from the numerical simulation of the corresponding transfer functions using arbitrary electrical parameters in order to illustrate the methodology. The advantage of our representation appears according to the comparison between our model and models presented in the paper, which are not physically acceptable due to the dimensional incompatibility. The Markovian nature of the models is recovered when the order of the fractional derivatives is equal to 1