Publications by authors named "M Apostolova"

One of the primary risk factors for implant failure is thought to be implant-related infections during the early healing phase. Developing coatings with cell stimulatory behaviour and bacterial adhesion control is still difficult for bone implants. This study proposes an approach for one-step deposition of biocompatible and antimicrobial Cu-doped TiO coatings via glow-discharge sputtering of a mosaic target.

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T cells recognize several types of antigens in tumors, including aberrantly expressed, nonmutated proteins, which are therefore shared with normal tissue and referred to as self/shared-antigens (SSA), and mutated proteins or oncogenic viral proteins, which are referred to as tumor-specific antigens (TSA). Immunotherapies such as immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) can activate T-cell responses against TSA, leading to tumor control, and also against SSA, causing immune-related adverse events (irAE). To improve anti-TSA immunity while limiting anti-SSA autoreactivity, we need to understand how tumor-specific CD8+ T cells (TST) and SSA-specific CD8+ T (SST) cells differentiate in response to cognate antigens during tumorigenesis.

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To fix the bone in orthopedics, it is almost always necessary to use implants. Metals provide the needed physical and mechanical properties for load-bearing applications. Although widely used as biomedical materials for the replacement of hard tissue, metallic implants still confront challenges, among which the foremost is their low biocompatibility.

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In this work, the micro-arc oxidation method is used to fabricate surface-modified complex-structured titanium implant coatings to improve biocompatibility. Depending on the utilized electrolyte solution and micro-arc oxidation process parameters, three different types of coatings (one of them-oxide, another two-calcium phosphates) were obtained, differing in their coating thickness, crystallite phase composition and, thus, with a significantly different biocompatibility. An analytical approach based on X-ray computed tomography utilizing software-aided coating recognition is employed in this work to reveal their structural uniformity.

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Expectations for safer and sustainable chemicals and products are growing to comply with the United Nations and European strategies for sustainability. The application of Safe(r) by Design (SbD) in nanotechnology implies an iterative process where functionality, human health and safety, environmental and economic impact and cost are assessed and balanced as early as possible in the innovation process and updated at each step. The EU H2020 NanoReg2 project was the first European project to implement SbD in six companies handling and/or manufacturing nanomaterials (NMs) and nano-enabled products (NEP).

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