Colon-Targeted Oral Drug Delivery Systems: Design Trends and Approaches

Colon-specific drug delivery systems (CDDS) are desirable for the treatment of a range of local diseases such as ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pancreatitis, and colonic cancer. In addition, the colon can be a potential site for the systemic absorption of several drugs to treat non-colonic conditions. Drugs such as proteins and peptides that are known to degrade in the extreme gastric pH, if delivered to the colon intact, can be systemically absorbed by colonic mucosa. In order to achieve effective therapeutic outcomes, it is imperative that the designed delivery system specifically targets the drugs into the colon. Several formulation approaches have been explored in the development colon-targeted drug delivery systems. These approaches involve the use of formulation components that interact with one or more aspects of gastrointestinal (GI) physiology, such as the difference in the pH along the GI tract, the presence of colonic microflora, and enzymes, to achieve colon targeting. This article highlights the factors influencing colon-specific drug delivery and colonic bioavailability, and the limitations associated with CDDS. Further, the review provides a systematic discussion of various conventional, as well as relatively newer formulation approaches/technologies currently being utilized for the development of CDDS

Sex on the brain: The rise and fall of German sexual science

Throughout the nineteenth century, German medical, scientific and legal scholars found themselves puzzled and engaged by the diverse forms of human sexuality. Psychiatrists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing who were interested in explaining deviance encountered scientifically trained advocates for emancipation like Magnus Hirschfeld, and the result was the new – if unstable – discipline of sexual science. Because they based arguments for social intervention on knowledge of nature and the body, the field\u27s proponents – like the advocates of eugenics and racial hygiene – argued that they were biologists. After 1900, this mutual biological engagement of sexual science and eugenics revealed itself in overlapping debates between the proponents of both fields

Beyond the Straight State: On the Borderlands of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Nation in the United States and Europe

Borderlands-limned, delimited, and defined by the presence, imaginary presence, or absence of geospatial boundaries contingent upon state power have many representations. Positive and negative state sanction through rights, privileges, policing, or enforcement are often determined by a person\u27s position with respect to such boundaries. Sometimes such boundaries, like the borders of nation-states that generally define citizenship, seem to have taken on nearly immutable fixity. The historical processes through which institutional structures accredited to these questions of space and sanction began to take their modem shape in the eighteenth century. Often, however, borderlands are more imagined than physical, more contingent upon concepts and identifications than upon fixed geospatial boundaries. Daniel T. Rodgers\u27s expression of this polyvalent issue is clear and succinct: \u27 Borderlands\u27 is a word of multiple and competing uses, some of which extend far beyond its core, geographic meanings into a general cultural metaphor. Such metaphorical borderlands, spheres of imaginary and contingent action, represent the sites of complex and multi-layered processes of institutional and self-identification like ethnicity. Any successful exploration of the relationships between nation and ethnicity must therefore reflect how the geophysical borderlands of states and institutions shade over into the conceptual and metaphorical borderlands of individual and group identities

Today, Tomorrow, and In-Between: Straub/Huillet, the Schoenbergs, and the Gendered Micropolitics of Operatic Performance in Von heute auf morgen

Artists who have confronted the politics of collaborative theater have been both drawn to and repelled by opera, intrigued by its aesthetic possibilities, its suspect politics, and its economic entanglements. Central to opera’s fascination has also been its complex and manifestly gendered production of texts, voices, and performances. This essay explores the 1929 one-act opera Von heute auf morgen by the librettist-composer team of Gertrud and Arnold Schoenberg, and a collaborative filmic performance of it in the 1996 film of the same name by the directorial-production team of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (musical direction by Michael Gielen). These two documents of operatic collaboration, along with the paired intertexts made up of the Straub/Huillet – Gielen film version of Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (1974-75), interrogate the complex field of attention to reveal its links to the aesthetics of gender, performance, and agency. Thus emerges an essential performative micropolitics embodying potential resistance to the opera’s political economy of gendered domination

Intersexes and Mixed Races: Visuality, Narrative, and ‘Bastard’ Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

1he founding of the German Empire in 1871, and the resulting constellation of intra-European and colonial conflicts, generated a wide range of new concerns about rhe characteristics and determinants of Germanness. Scholars, politicians, medical authorities, legal professionals, and artists explored and debated standards of inclusion and exclusion as they propagated both intellectual and institutional ways to develop and mainrain standards for what qualified as German. \VolfLepenies argues char rhe result was a tenuous relationship between the newly scare-defined German political sphere and the other fluid means of establishing rhe Germanness of those who inhabited rhe new state. At rimes, it ... seemed as if the German stare was a stare without politics, rhar is, a state with vassals bur without citizens. Yet it never aimed at being a state wirhour culture. 2 Ir rhus often appeared that any self-defined German identity cook a back sear to a range of intellectuall

Afterword: Gesamtkunstwerk as Epistemic Space

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form

The Visible Hand and the New American Biology: Toward an Integrated Historiography of Railroad-Supported Agricultural Research

In the early twentieth century, American railroad companies faced new challenges. The railroad network had developed fully, broad political opposition was gaining teeth in new, enforceable federal legislation, and financial markets-first established to support railroad expansion- had begun to move beyond railroads. Railroad companies answered with a wide range of new managerial and scientific practices. Recent scholarship that goes beyond the traditional disciplinary separation of technological, political, managerial, economic, and scientific concerns has enabled historians to recognize that agricultural research pursued in concert with other institutions empowered railroads to address all of these challenges in the period between 1900 and 1930

The interplay of university and industry through the FP5 network

To improve the quality of life in a modern society it is essential to reduce the distance between basic research and applications, whose crucial roles in shaping today's society prompt us to seek their understanding. Existing studies on this subject, however, have neglected the network character of the interaction between university and industry. Here we use state-of-the-art network theory methods to analyze this interplay in the so-called Framework Programme--an initiative which sets out the priorities for the European Union's research and technological development. In particular we study in the 5th Framework Programme (FP5) the role played by companies and scientific institutions and how they contribute to enhance the relationship between research and industry. Our approach provides quantitative evidence that while firms are size hierarchically organized, universities and research organizations keep the network from falling into pieces, paving the way for an effective knowledge transfer.Comment: 21 pages (including Appendix), 8 figures. Published online at http://stacks.iop.org/1367-2630/9/18

Per Scientiam ad Justitiam: Magnus Hirschfeld\u27s Episteme of Biological Publicity

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was founded in Berlin in 1919 as a place of research, political advocacy, counseling, and public education. Inspired by the world’s first gay rights organizations, it was closely allied with other groups fighting for sexual reform and women’s rights, and was destroyed in 1933 as the first target of the Nazi book burnings. Not Straight from Germany examines the legacy of that history, combining essays and a lavish array of visual materials. Scholarly essays investigate the ways in which sex became public in early 20th-century Germany, contributing to a growing awareness of Hirschfeld’s influence on histories of sexuality while also widening the perspective beyond the lens of identity politics. Two visual sourcebooks and catalog essays on an exhibition of contemporary artists’ responses to the Hirschfeld historical materials interrogate the modes of visual representation that Hirschfeld employed by re-imagining the public visibility of his institute from a contemporary perspective. The archival material includes stunning, never-before-published images from Hirschfeld’s institute that challenge many received ideas, while the scholarly and art catalog essays explore collaboration and dialogue as methods of research and activism that resonate beyond the academy to pressing issues of public concern

Intersexes and Mixed Races: Visuality, Narrative, and Bastard Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany\u27

Intersexes and Mixed Races: Visuality, Narrative, and Bastard Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany\u2