Liposomal Tumor Targeting in Drug Delivery Utilizing MMP-2- and MMP-9-Binding Ligands.

Nanotechnology offers an alternative to conventional treatment options by enabling different drug delivery and controlled-release delivery strategies. Liposomes being especially biodegradable and in most cases essentially nontoxic offer a versatile platform for several different delivery approaches that can potentially enhance the delivery and targeting of therapies to tumors. Liposomes penetrate tumors spontaneously as a result of fenestrated blood vessels within tumors, leading to known enhanced permeability and subsequent drug retention effects.

Diurnal variation of melatonin and cortisol is maintained in non-septic intensive care patients.

Objective: To study the diurnal variation of melatonin and cortisol in critically ill patients and to assess whether the severity of organ dysfunction, sedation and sympathetic activity correlate with the production of these hormones.

Design: Prospective clinical study.

Setting: Surgical intensive care unit in a university hospital.

Hormonal stress response and hemodynamic stability in patients undergoing endovascular vs. conventional abdominal aortic aneurysm repair.

Background And Aims: To investigate the effect of two different surgical techniques with different anesthetic modes on intraoperative and postoperative hormonal stress response, hemodynamic stability, fluid loading and renal function in patients scheduled for elective infrarenal abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair.

Materials And Methods: Forty consecutive patients scheduled for elective infrarenal AAA repair were allocated without randomizing into two groups: an endovascular (EVAR, n = 20) and a conventional (CAR, n = 20) aneurysm repair group according to aneurysm morphology as determined by preoperative computed tomography and angiography. The EVAR group were operated under spinal anesthesia and the CAR group using general anesthesia with epidural blockade.

Off-pump surgery does not eliminate microalbuminuria or other markers of systemic inflammatory response to coronary artery bypass surgery.

Objective: To evaluate whether off-pump surgery attenuates microalbuminuria and other markers of systemic inflammatory response to coronary artery bypass surgery as compared to surgery performed using cardiopulmonary bypass.

Design: Forty-three adult patients undergoing elective coronary artery bypass grafting surgery were operated on with or without cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). Microalbuminuria, serum C-reactive protein, and oxygenation and lung function parameters were measured at several time points until the first postoperative morning.

Radionuclide imaging of tumor xenografts in mice using a gelatinase-targeting peptide.

Tumors express MMP-2 and MMP-9 gelatinases, which are involved in the formation of tumor vasculature. This suggests that a tumor and its surrounding neovasculature can be visualized by a sensitive gelatinase recognition method. We have studied tumor radioimaging using a gelatinase inhibitory peptide CTTHWGFTLC (CTT), which in a mouse model targets the tumor site following an intravenous injection.