Effect of cellulose acetate phthalate and polyethylene glycol on physical properties and release of theophylline from microcapsules

O presente estudo descreve o desenvolvimento de microcápsulas de teofilina pelo método sem adição de solvente e o efeito da adição de plastificante na microencapsulação. A liberação foi estudada em água destilada e os dados foram analisados por vários modelos matemáticos para determinação do mecanismo de liberação. As microcápsulas preparadas mostraram-se esféricas, livres de corrente e com mais de 80% de fármaco encapsulado. O polímero - ftalato de acetato de celulose e o plastificante - polietileno glicol - afetaram as propriedades das microcápsulas, incluindo a liberação do fármaco (tempo para liberação de 50% do fármaco, T50). A formulação com a maior proporção de polímero e sem plastificante (F3) se mostrou como a de liberação mais lenta, com T50 = 4,3 h, enquanto as formulações com menor proporção de polímero e 20% de plastificante (m/m) (F13 &14) apresentaram a liberação mais rápida do fármaco, com T50 de 1,2 h e 1,3 h, respectivamente. A liberação do fármaco para a maioria das formulações seguiu o modelo de Higuchi. Concluiu-se, dos resultados do presente estudo, que o ftalato do acetato de celulose afeta significativamente a liberação controlada do fármaco em água, enquanto que a adição de polietileno glicol aumenta ligeiramente a liberação do fármaco.The present study describes the development of theophylline microcapsules by a non-solvent addition method and the effect of plasticizer addition on microencapsulation. The release was studied in distilled water and the data were analysed by various mathematical models for determining the mechanism of release. Prepared microcapsules were found to be spherical, free flowing and having more than 80% entrapped drug. The polymer - cellulose acetate phthalate and plasticizer - polyethylene glycol was considered to be affecting the properties of microcapsules including drug release (time for 50% drug release, T50). The formulation with the highest proportion of polymer and without plasticizer (F3) showed the slowest release with T50 = 4.3 h, while the formulation with lower proportion of polymer and 20% (w/w) plasticizer (F13 &14) showed the fastest release of drug with T50 values of 1.2 h and 1.3 h, respectively. The drug release from most of the formulations was found to be following Higuchi model. It is concluded from the results of the present study that cellulose acetate phthalate significantly affects the sustained release of the drug in water, whereas the addition of polyethylene glycol slightly enhances the drug release

Environmental management accounting practices in Australian cotton farming : the use of the theory of planned behaviour

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between the belief-based factors (attitude, subjective norm (SN) and perceived behavioural control (PBC)) and environmental management accounting (EMA) practices. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), the study develops a structural model and uses partial least squares (PLS) technique to analyse data collected based on a survey of the Australian cotton farmers. Findings – The findings indicate that while attitude and PBC significantly influence farmers’ intention to adopt EMA practices, SN has a significant indirect influence on EMA practices through farmers’ attitude and PBC. Further, the study reveals that while the intention of more environmentally friendly farmers is largely influenced by attitude and SN, the intention of less environmentally friendly farmers is primarily driven by PBC. Practical implications – The study provides important insights into the role of attitude, SN and PBC in motivating farmers towards adopting EMA practices. Such insights could also help farmers in designing effective EMA practices. Originality/value – This study contributes to very limited EMA literature on TPB by integrating three belief-based factors namely attitude, SN and PBC

Treatment-related mortality in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in a low-middle income country

Objective: To determine the proportion of treatment-related mortality (TRM) among mortalities of Pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), to identify probable causes and risk factors. Methods: An observational; retrospective, cohort study. Pediatric patients of ALL who expired during treatment were enrolled. Death due to relapse and deaths before treatment were excluded. Retrospective data was collected from ward record and analyzed in SPSS 16. Results: Total 247 patients of ALL expired while 144 patients were enrolled as per inclusion criteria. The proportion of TRM was 58.3%. Median age was 5 years. Male-to-female ratio was 1.3:1. Commonest cause of TRM was sepsis (n=126, 87.5%), followed by hemorrhagic complications (n=11, 7.6%), drug toxicity (n=4, 2.8%), tumor lysis syndrome (n=2, 1.4%) and thromboembolism (n=1, 0.7%). Significant factors associated with TRM were weight-for-age, immunophenotype, reason for admission and absolute neutrophil count. Conclusion: Treatment-related mortality though potentially avoidable is still a major cause of death among pediatric patients of ALL in low-middle income countries. Sepsis is the most common cause and infection prevention and control is vital in improving survival. Best supportive care must be made available for the patients on induction chemotherapy, with concomitant malnutrition, high-risk immunophenotype and profound neutropenia. Continuous..

Evaluation of impact of pharmaceutical care services on cardiologist adherence to hypertension Guidelines JNC 7: A critical prospect for rational use of drugs in Pakistan

Purpose: To assess the adherence of cardiologists to JNC7 and the impact of pharmacists in reducing clinical inertia by managing high blood pressure in the cardiology out-patient department of the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Methods: This was a pre- and post-interventional prospective study in which data was abstracted from patients’ history notes or prescription of selected patients at baseline and follow-up visits by applying a reliable tool. The data were abstracted again from the same patients to evaluate the cardiologists’ adherence with the same parameters after 2,4 and 6 months. The sample size for this study was 116 patients and descriptive statistics were used for categorical variables. For the comparison of cardiologist’s adherence to JNC7, means and paired ‘t’ test were used at the level of 0.05 significance. Results: At baseline, the mean overall percentage of cardiologists’ adherence to JNC7 was 46.7 ± 18.9 %. This significantly improved to 98.8 ± 6.0 % after 2 months of the pharmacist intervening by way of discussions with cardiologists. The cardiologists’ adherence was further improved to 100 % after 4 and 6 months. Conclusion: Improvement in cardiologists’ adherence to JNC 7 guidelines and involvement of the pharmacist enhance the documentation of BP goal, lifestyle modifications and uncontrolled BP. All these helps to overcome clinical inertia that ultimately leads to better BP control and rational use of medicines

Effect of cellulose acetate phthalate and polyethylene glycol on physical properties and release of theophylline from microcapsules

ABSTRACT The present study describes the development of theophylline microcapsules by a non-solvent addition method and the effect of plasticizer addition on microencapsulation. The release was studied in distilled water and the data were analysed by various mathematical models for determining the mechanism of release. Prepared microcapsules were found to be spherical, free flowing and having more than 80% entrapped drug. The polymer - cellulose acetate phthalate and plasticizer - polyethylene glycol was considered to be affecting the properties of microcapsules including drug release (time for 50% drug release, T50). The formulation with the highest proportion of polymer and without plasticizer (F3) showed the slowest release with T50 = 4.3 h, while the formulation with lower proportion of polymer and 20% (w/w) plasticizer (F13 &14) showed the fastest release of drug with T50 values of 1.2 h and 1.3 h, respectively. The drug release from most of the formulations was found to be following Higuchi model. It is concluded from the results of the present study that cellulose acetate phthalate significantly affects the sustained release of the drug in water, whereas the addition of polyethylene glycol slightly enhances the drug release

iACP-MultiCNN: Multi-channel CNN based anticancer peptides identification

Cancer is one of the most dangerous diseases in the world that often leads to misery and death. Current treatments include different kinds of anticancer therapy which exhibit different types of side effects. Because of certain physicochemical properties, anticancer peptides (ACPs) have opened a new path of treatments for this deadly disease. That is why a well-performed methodology for identifying novel anticancer peptides has great importance in the fight against cancer. In addition to the laboratory techniques, various machine learning and deep learning methodologies have developed in recent years for this task. Although these models have shown reasonable predictive ability, there’s still room for improvement in terms of performance and exploring new types of algorithms. In this work, we have proposed a novel multi-channel convolutional neural network (CNN) for identifying anticancer peptides from protein sequences. We have collected data from the existing state-of-the-art methodologies and applied binary encoding for data preprocessing. We have also employed k-fold cross-validation to train our models on benchmark datasets and compared our models’ performance on the independent datasets. The comparison has indicated our models’ superiority on various evaluation metrics. We think our work can be a valuable asset in finding novel anticancer peptides. We have provided a user-friendly web server for academic purposes and it is publicly available at: http://103.99.176.239/iacp-cnn/ Keywords: cancer, anticancer peptides, CNN, Binary classification, deep learnin

Synthesis and characterization of Hyaluronic Acid (HA) modified polymeric composite for effective treatment of wound healing by transdermal drug delivery system (TDDS)

Abstract The present study aimed to fabricate a novel polymeric spongy composite to enhance skin regeneration composed of Nystatin (antifungal agent) and Silver Nanoparticles (AgNps). Different formulations (F1–F8) were developed & characterized by using various analytical techniques. AgNps synthesized by chemical reduction method showed spherical morphology 2 µm in size showed by SEM and XRD. A fine porous structure of gel embedded with AgNps having an amorphous structure with 10 % crystallinity due to AgNps was found. IR spectra revealed no chemical interaction between polymers and Nystatin. An increase in thermal stability of formulation was observed till 700 ℃ analyzed by Differential Scanning Calorimetry. Cytotoxic analysis on L929 mouse skin fibroblast cells showed a decrease in cell viability as Ag concentration increased (inactivating Fibroblast and keratinocytes) while 10 mg composition was found safest concentration (94%). Optimized formulation (F2) presented in-vitro drug release up to 90.59% ± 0.76 at pH 7.4, swelling studies (87.5% ± 0.57), water retention (26.60 ± 0.34), pH (5.31 ± 0.03). In the animal burn model, the group that received CHG/Ag/Nystatin healed the wound significantly (p < 0.05). These results suggested that optimized carrier can be used for other anti-fungal drugs facilitating the early healing of the wound