Radiolabeled tirofiban – a potential radiopharmaceutical for detection of deep venous thrombosis

Marija Darkovska-Serafimovska,1,2 Emilija Janevik-Ivanovska,1 Icko Djorgoski,2 Zorica Arsova-Sarafinovska,1,3 Milka Zdravkovska,1 Trajan Balkanov,4 Nenad Ugresic5 1Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Goce Delcev University, Stip, 2Department of Physiology, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, 3Department of Quality Control of Medicines, Institute for Public Health of the Republic of Macedonia, 4Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Faculty of Medicine, Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia; 5Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility of using 99mtechnetium (99mTc)-labeled tirofiban (a reversible antagonist of glycoprotein IIb/IIIa) for detection of deep venous thrombosis (DVT) in rats without causing an antiplatelet effect.Methods: The ability of in vitro tirofiban to inhibit adenosine 5'-diphosphate (ADP)-induced platelet aggregation was evaluated using optical aggregometer. Binding of 99mTc-tirofiban to platelets was evaluated. Serum levels of unlabeled (a validated high performance liquid chromatography method) and 99mTc-tirofiban after single intravenous injection were evaluated in male Wistar rats with or without induced DVT (femoral vein ligation model), and the rats were also subjected to whole body scintigraphy.Results: Tirofiban in vitro inhibits ADP-induced aggregation of human platelets in a dose- and concentration-dependent manner (10 nM to 2 µM), but only if it is added before ADP and not after ADP. 99mTc labeling did not affect the ability of tirofiban to bind to either human or rat platelets, nor did it affect tirofiban pharmacokinetics in intact rats or in animals with induced DVT. When 99mTc-tirofiban was injected to rats after induction of DVT, at a molar dose lower than the one showing only a weak antiaggregatory effect in vitro, whole body scintigraphy indicated localization of 99mTc-tirofiban around the place of the induced DVT.Conclusion: 99mTc labeling of tirofiban does not affect its ability to bind to glycoprotein IIb/IIIa or its in vivo pharmacokinetics in rats, either intact or with DVT. A low, nonantiaggregatory dose of 99mTc-tirofiban may be used to visualize DVT at an early stage. Keywords: tirofiban, 99mtechnetium, deep venous thrombosis, visualizatio

What remains of Yugoslavia? From the geopolitical space of Yugoslavia to the virtual space of the Web Yugosphere

The article works from the double hypothesis that: (1) a Yugoslav socio-cultural space still exists in spite of the dissolution of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; (2) the communities \u2018occupying\u2019 this space can be considered, in some measure, \u2018diasporic\u2019, if the \u2018Yugoslav diaspora\u2019 is defined by not only the geographic displacement of people but also by the loosening of the connections between the members of an ex-nation who still consider themselves a national community. The \u2018space\u2019 mapped in the essay is the so-called \u2018virtual space\u2019 of the Web, including all websites that reconnect to the \u2018cultural languages\u2019 of the \u2018past-country\u2019. The author observes how these \u2018different Yugoslavias\u2019 are \u2018staged\u2019 and linked together on the Web, and verifies how some far-flung communities rally around the \u2018virtual re-foundation\u2019 and \u2018virtual representations\u2019 of Yugoslavia. The corpus is constituted mainly of \u2018yugonostalgic\u2019 websites that are subjected to a content analysis. The 191 websites of the corpus and the hyper-textual map of their edges are analysed using semantic features together with other tools of categorization

The Ruins of Cape Town’s District Six

This article gives an account of the praxis of cape town’s district six museum in relation to the restitution and redevelopment of district six. During south africa’s apartheid regime, district six was declared a whites-only area according the group areas act of 1966. Colored and black inhabitants were forcibly removed and their houses were destroyed on the grounds of slum clearance. Twenty years into democracy, we can think of how the materiality of shattered landscape presents ways of connecting to degraded personhoods, in the past and the present. This article portrays how the museum tackles the challenge of naming the heritage of district six outside the logic of cape town as a global city. It points to two moments in which the museum self-consciously put a counter-practice in place against the grain of dominant discourses that give shape to cape town