DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF CIPROFLOXACIN HYDROCHLORIDE LOADED OCULAR INSERT BY USING PLANTAGO OVATA†AS NATURAL POLYMER

Objective: The present work focus in the direction of Development and evaluation of Ciprofloxacin Hydrochloride loaded ocular insert by using plantago ovata†as natural polymerâ€. The current work was carried out to evaluate the control release profile of ocular insert. Natural polymer in ocular insert was used for studying the long acting property. Natural polymer is also used to enhance the bioavailability of drug and reduce toxicity. It is also used to increase the duration of action of drug for prolongs action and gives better in vitro performance as compare than to the conventional ocular formulation.Methods: Solvent casting method was used in the formulation of Ciprofloxacin Hydrochloride loaded ocular inserts. Different ocular insert formulations of varying polymer concentration were prepared. Ocular insert formulation H-1 to H-3 was prepared by using different concentration of HPMC and formulation P-1 to P-4 was prepared by using different concentration of Plantago Ovata.Results: The ocular inserts formulation was within the acceptable limits. All the pre formulation parameters of polymers such as derived properties, compressibility index, Hausner's ratio, viscosity, melting point, swelling ratio, loss on drying, PH of mucilage solution and pre formulation of active pharmaceutical ingredient such as estimation of drug by using UV spectroscopy, determination of melting point, solubility, partition coefficient and FTIR for compatibility study of drug and excipient were evaluation. FTIR analysis also confirmed no drug-excipient interaction.Conclusion: Prepared inserts in the present study were semitransparent. The mixing of the drug in to the polymer is uniform, due to this; the drug content of all formulation is good. Formulation P4 was selected because it showed better release profile, drug content and other physicochemical properties than other formulated batch when compare. All the prepared inserts showed in vitro drug release for the period of 4 h as compare to the marketed formulation. An in vitro drug release study revealed that ocular formulation gives a prolong action. The formulation was found to be long acting

Graph learning methods to extract empathy supporting regions in a naturalistic stimuli fMRI

Functional MRI (fMRI) research, employing naturalistic stimuli like movies, explores brain network interactions in complex cognitive processes such as empathy. The empathy network encompasses multiple brain areas, including the Insula, PFC, ACC, and parietal regions. Our novel processing pipeline applies graph learning methods to whole-brain timeseries signals, incorporating high-pass filtering, voxel-level clustering, and windowed graph learning with a sparsity-based approach. The study involves two short movies shown to 14 healthy volunteers, considering 54 regions extracted from the AAL Atlas. The sparsity-based graph learning consistently outperforms, achieving over 88% accuracy in capturing emotion contagion variations. Temporal analysis reveals a gradual induction of empathy, supported by the method's effectiveness in capturing dynamic connectomes through graph clustering. Edge-weight dynamics analysis underscores sparsity-based learning's superiority, while connectome-network analysis highlights the pivotal role of the Insula, Amygdala, and Thalamus in empathy. Spectral filtering analysis emphasizes the band-pass filter's significance in isolating regions linked to emotional and empathetic processing during empathy HIGH states. Key regions like Amygdala, Insula, and Angular Gyrus consistently activate, supporting their critical role in immediate emotional responses. Strong similarities across movies in graph cluster labels, connectome-network analysis, and spectral filtering-based analyses reveal robust neural correlates of empathy. These findings advance our understanding of empathy-related neural dynamics and identify specific regions in empathetic responses, offering insights for targeted interventions and treatments associated with empathetic processing.Comment: 9 figures, 2 table

The tumour microenvironment modulates cancer cell intravasation

Development of three dimensional (3D) in vitro models to realistically recapitulate tumor microenvironment has the potential to improve translatability of anti-cancer drugs at the preclinical stage. To capture the in vivo complexity, these in vitro models should minimally incorporate the 3D interactions between multiple cell types, cellular structures such as vasculature and extracellular matrices. Here, we utilised microfluidic platforms to study the effect of various natural hydrogels (fibrin, collagen, Matrigel) and presence of tumor spheroids on the 3D vascularisation morphology. Various extracellular matrix (ECM) compositions impacted the vessel morphology while near the tumor spheroids the vessel diameter was considerably smaller for all different ECM compositions. Strikingly, cancer cells could enter the microvessel lumens (i.e. intravasate) only when the ECM was comprised of all the three types of hydrogels which increased the physical contact between the microvessels and the tumour spheroids. Our findings highlight the role of ECM composition in modulating the intravasation capacity of tumours

Prevalence of goitre and its associated factors in a coastal district of Karnataka

Context: Iodine deficiency Disorders (IDDs) are a major public health problem globally. In India more than 200 million are at risk for this disorder. It affects people of all ages and both sexes. The mental impairment caused by IDD especially in children is an important consequence of IDD. Aim: To find the prevalence of IDDs and the associated factors with it. Settings and Design: A school based cross – sectional study. Methods and Material: The study was done in Udupi district of Karnataka using a pretested, semistructured questionnaire. The villages of the three talukas (Udupi, Kundapur and Karkala) of Udupi district were sampled according to Probability Proportionate to Size (PPS).One school was chosen for the study from each of the 30 selected villages. Minimum of 90 students were selected from each school. Salt and urine samples were collected for Iodine estimation from a sub sample. Goitre was graded according to WHO/UNICEF/ICCIDD criteria. Results: A total of 3023 children were examined (M = 49.1%, F = 50.9%). The prevalence of goitre in Udupi district was 19.8%. The prevalence of goitre was found to be more amongst females compared to males (p = 0.021) and also was found to be increasing with the increasing age (p = 0.003). Of the 539 salt samples analyzed 23.7 % were inadequately iodized. Education of the father, fish consumption and occupation of the mother were found to be significant predictors of goitre. Conclusions: Goitre is a public health problem in Udupi district of Karnataka. The adequately Iodized salt coverage which should have been more than 90 % is not fulfilled. More awareness is required amongst the people about IDDs and its predictors

In vitro α-amylase and α-glucosidase inhibitory potential of Pleurotus ostreatus cv. Florida extract

Pleurotus ostreatus cv. Florida is one of the widely used edible mushroom. The polysaccharides from this mushrooms have been studied for antidiabetic potential; however, no efforts have been made to explore the potential of this mushroom to influence carbohydrate metabolizing enzymes viz. α-amylase and α-glucosidase. The present work was undertaken to investigate the inhibitory potential of Pleurotus ostreatus cv. Florida on enzymes α-amylase and α-glucosidase. Several concentrations of extracts were used to study inhibition of enzymatic activity of α-amylase and α-glucosidase. A dose dependent inhibitory effect on enzymes was observed. The current study, for the first time, uncovered α-amylase and α-glucosidase inhibitory potential of Pleurotus ostreatus cv. Florida. The study could be helpful to isolate and characterize compounds responsible for it

Stromal cells regulate mechanics of tumour spheroid

The remarkable contractility and force generation ability exhibited by cancer cells empower them to overcome the resistance and steric hindrance presented by a three-dimensional, interconnected matrix. Cancer cells disseminate by actively remodelling and deforming their extracellular matrix (ECM). The process of tumour growth and its ECM remodelling have been extensively studied, but the effect of the cellular tumour microenvironment (TME) has been ignored in most studies that investigated tumour-cell-mediated ECM deformations and realignment. This study reports the integration of stromal cells in spheroid contractility assays that impacts the ECM remodelling and invasion abilities of cancer spheroids. To investigate this, we developed a novel multilayer in vitro assay that incorporates stromal cells and quantifies the contractile deformations that tumour spheroids exert on the ECM. We observed a negative correlation between the spheroid invasion potential and the levels of collagen deformation. The presence of stromal cells significantly increased cancer cell invasiveness and altered the cancer cells' ability to deform and realign collagen gel, due to upregulation of proinflammatory cytokines. Interestingly, this was observed consistently in both metastatic and non-metastatic cancer cells. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the vital role played by the cellular TME in regulating the invasive outgrowth of cancer cells and underscore the potential of utilising matrix deformation measurements as a biophysical marker for evaluating invasiveness and informing targeted therapeutic opportunities

BioThings Explorer: a query engine for a federated knowledge graph of biomedical APIs

Knowledge graphs are an increasingly common data structure for representing biomedical information. These knowledge graphs can easily represent heterogeneous types of information, and many algorithms and tools exist for querying and analyzing graphs. Biomedical knowledge graphs have been used in a variety of applications, including drug repurposing, identification of drug targets, prediction of drug side effects, and clinical decision support. Typically, knowledge graphs are constructed by centralization and integration of data from multiple disparate sources. Here, we describe BioThings Explorer, an application that can query a virtual, federated knowledge graph derived from the aggregated information in a network of biomedical web services. BioThings Explorer leverages semantically precise annotations of the inputs and outputs for each resource, and automates the chaining of web service calls to execute multi-step graph queries. Because there is no large, centralized knowledge graph to maintain, BioThing Explorer is distributed as a lightweight application that dynamically retrieves information at query time. More information can be found at https://explorer.biothings.io, and code is available at https://github.com/biothings/biothings_explorer

Endothelium and Subendothelial Matrix Mechanics Modulate Cancer Cell Transendothelial Migration

Cancer cell extravasation, a key step in the metastatic cascade, involves cancer cell arrest on the endothelium, transendothelial migration (TEM), followed by the invasion into the subendothelial extracellular matrix (ECM) of distant tissues. While cancer research has mostly focused on the biomechanical interactions between tumor cells (TCs) and ECM, particularly at the primary tumor site, very little is known about the mechanical properties of endothelial cells and the subendothelial ECM and how they contribute to the extravasation process. Here, an integrated experimental and theoretical framework is developed to investigate the mechanical crosstalk between TCs, endothelium and subendothelial ECM during in vitro cancer cell extravasation. It is found that cancer cell actin-rich protrusions generate complex push-pull forces to initiate and drive TEM, while transmigration success also relies on the forces generated by the endothelium. Consequently, mechanical properties of the subendothelial ECM and endothelial actomyosin contractility that mediate the endothelial forces also impact the endothelium's resistance to cancer cell transmigration. These results indicate that mechanical features of distant tissues, including force interactions between the endothelium and the subendothelial ECM, are key determinants of metastatic organotropism

Emergent mechanical control of vascular morphogenesis

Vascularization is driven by morphogen signals and mechanical cues that coordinately regulate cellular force generation, migration, and shape change to sculpt the developing vascular network. However, it remains unclear whether developing vasculature actively regulates its own mechanical properties to achieve effective vascularization. We engineered tissue constructs containing endothelial cells and fibroblasts to investigate the mechanics of vascularization. Tissue stiffness increases during vascular morphogenesis resulting from emergent interactions between endothelial cells, fibroblasts, and ECM and correlates with enhanced vascular function. Contractile cellular forces are key to emergent tissue stiffening and synergize with ECM mechanical properties to modulate the mechanics of vascularization. Emergent tissue stiffening and vascular function rely on mechanotransduction signaling within fibroblasts, mediated by YAP1. Mouse embryos lacking YAP1 in fibroblasts exhibit both reduced tissue stiffness and develop lethal vascular defects. Translating our findings through biology-inspired vascular tissue engineering approaches will have substantial implications in regenerative medicine