Dendritic polyurethane-based prodrug as unimolecular micelles for precise ultrasound-activated localized drug delivery

Ultrasound has been recognized as an exciting tool to enhance the therapeutic efficacy in tumor chemotherapy owing to the triggered drug release, facilitated intracellular drug delivery, and improved spatial precision. Aiming for a precise localized drug delivery, novel dendritic polyurethane-based prodrug (DOX-DPU-PEG) was fabricated with a drug content of 18.9% here by conjugating DOX onto the end groups of the functionalized dendritic polyurethane via acid-labile imine bonds. It could easily form unimolecular micelles around 38 nm. Compared with the non-covalently drug-loaded unimolecular micelles (DOX@Ph-DPU-PEG), they showed excellent pH/ultrasound dual-triggered drug release performance, with drug leakage of only 4% at pH 7.4, but cumulative release of 14% and 88% at pH 5.0 without and with ultrasound, respectively. The ultrasound responsiveness was attributed to the unique strawberry-shaped topological structure of the DOX-DPU-PEG, in which DOX was embedded in the skin layer of the hydrophobic DPU cores. With ultrasound, the DOX-DPU-PEG unimolecular micelles possessed enhanced tumor growth inhibition than free DOX but showed no obvious cytotoxicity on the tumor cells without ultrasound. Such feature makes them promising potential for precise localized drug delivery.     

Duality respecting representations and compatible complexity measures for gammoids

We show that every gammoid has special digraph representations, such that a representation of the dual of the gammoid may be easily obtained by reversing all arcs. In an informal sense, the duality notion of a poset applied to the digraph of a special representation of a gammoid commutes with the operation of forming the dual of that gammoid. We use these special representations in order to define a complexity measure for gammoids, such that the classes of gammoids with bounded complexity are closed under duality, minors, and direct sums.     

XPS study of silicon spheres as a density standard

As density is one of the basic physical properties of materials, an accurate density standard is absolutely essential. To determine density with high accuracy and precision, two 1-kg single-crystal silicon spheres (NMIJ-S4 and NMIJ-S5) are used as the primary standard at the National Metrology Institute of Japan. For the accurate measurement of the mass and volume of the silicon spheres, the effects of the surface layer must be carefully considered. In this work, a surface layer model of NMIJ-S4 and NMIJ-S5 was proposed and the thicknesses of each surface layer were determined using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. A detailed uncertainty budget is presented to aid use of the density standard.     

Functionalization of silica gel by ultrasound-assisted surface Suzuki coupling

Mesoporous silica gel was functionalized by various organic functional groups using thiol-ene coupling of surface thiol groups with 4-vinylphenylboronic acid followed by Suzuki coupling with aromatic halides. For better performance, the synthesis was conducted under sonication. The presence of surface functional groups was confirmed by thermoanalysis, FT-IR spectroscopy and characteristic reactions of these groups. Solid-phase conditions of the synthesis eliminate the risk of side reactions of boronic acids.     

Tighter Constraints of Multiqubit Entanglement

Monogamy and polygamy relations characterize the distributions of entanglement in multipartite systems.We provide classes of monogamy and polygamy inequalities of multiqubit entanglement in terms of concurrence, entanglement of formation, negativity, Tsallis-q entanglement, and Rényi-α entanglement, respectively. We show that these inequalities are tighter than the existing ones for some classes of quantum states.     

Sonochemical conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons: The Sabatier reaction at ambient conditions

In this study, we investigated an alternative method for the chemical CO₂ reduction reaction in which power ultrasound (488 kHz ultrasonic plate transducer) was applied to CO₂-saturated (up to 3%) pure water, NaCl and synthetic seawater solutions. Under ultrasonic conditions, the converted CO₂ products were found to be mainly CH₄, C₂H₄ and C₂H₆ including large amount of CO which was subsequently converted into CH₄. We have found that introducing molecular H₂ plays a crucial role in the CO₂ conversion process and that increasing hydrogen concentration increased the yields of hydrocarbons. However, it was observed that at higher hydrogen concentrations, the overall conversion decreased since hydrogen, a diatomic gas, is known to decrease cavitational activity in liquids. It was also found that 1.0 M NaCl solutions saturated with 2% CO₂ + 98% H₂ led to maximum hydrocarbon yields (close to 5%) and increasing the salt concentrations further decreased the yield of hydrocarbons due to the combined physical and chemical effects of ultrasound. It was shown that CO₂ present in a synthetic industrial flue gas (86.74% N₂, 13% CO₂, 0.2% O₂ and 600 ppm of CO) could be converted into hydrocarbons through this method by diluting the flue gas with hydrogen. Moreover, it was observed that in addition to pure water, synthetic seawater can also be used as an ultrasonicating media for the sonochemical process where the presence of NaCl improves the yields of hydrocarbons by ca. 40%. We have also shown that by using low frequency high-power ultrasound in the absence of catalysts, it is possible to carry out the conversion process at ambient conditions i.e., at room temperature and pressure. We are postulating that each cavitation bubble formed during ultrasonication act as a “micro-reactor” where the so-called Sabatier reaction -$C{O}_2+4H_2\stackrel{\mathit{Ultrasonication}}{\to }C{H}_4+2H_{2}O$ - takes place upon collapse of the bubble. We are naming this novel approach as the “Islam-Pollet-Hihn process”.