Transitioning from Pickering emulsions to Pickering emulsion hydrogels: A potential advancement in cosmeceuticals.

Cosmeceuticals, focusing on enhancing skin health and appearance, heavily rely on emulsions as one of the common mediums. These emulsions pose a challenge due to their dependence on surfactants which are essential for stability but are causing concerns about environmental impact as well as evolving consumer preferences. This has led to research focused on Pickering emulsions (PEs), which are colloidal particle-based emulsion alternatives.

Hydroxychloroquine: Key therapeutic advances and emerging nanotechnological landscape for cancer mitigation.

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is a unique class of medications that has been widely utilized for the treatment of cancer. HCQ plays a dichotomous role by inhibiting autophagy induced by the tumor microenvironment (TME). Preclinical studies support the use of HCQ for anti-cancer therapy, especially in combination with conventional anti-cancer treatments since they sensitize tumor cells to drugs, potentiating the therapeutic activity.

Stimuli-controllable iron oxide nanoparticle assemblies: Design, manipulation and bio-applications.

Despite its wide establishment over the years, iron oxide nanoparticle (IONP) still draws extensive interest in the biomedical fields due to its biocompatibility, biodegradability, magnetivity and surface tunable properties. IONP has been used for the MRI, magnetic targeting, drug delivery and hyperthermia of various diseases. However, their poor stability, low diagnostic sensitivity and low disease-specificity have resulted in unsatisfying diagnostic and therapeutic outputs.

Microenvironment-tailored nanoassemblies for the diagnosis and therapy of neurodegenerative diseases.

Neurodegenerative disorder is an illness involving neural dysfunction/death attributed to complex pathological processes, which eventually lead to the mortality of the host. It is generally recognized through features such as mitochondrial dysfunction, protein aggregation, oxidative stress, metal ions dyshomeostasis, membrane potential change, neuroinflammation and neurotransmitter impairment. The aforementioned neuronal dysregulations result in the formation of a complex neurodegenerative microenvironment (NME), and may interact with each other, hindering the performance of therapeutics for neurodegenerative disease (ND).

Recent advances of characterization techniques for the formation, physical properties and stability of Pickering emulsion.

Recently, there have been increasing demand for the application of Pickering emulsions in various industries due to its combined advantage in terms of cost, quality and sustainability. This review aims to provide a complete overview of the available methodology for the physical characterization of emulsions that are stabilized by solid particles (known as Pickering emulsion). Current approaches and techniques for the analysis of the formation and properties of the Pickering emulsion were outlined along with the expected results of these methods on the emulsions.

Prediction of droplet sizes for oil-in-water emulsion systems assisted by ultrasound cavitation: Transient scaling law based on dynamic breakup potential.

The dynamics of droplet breakup during emulsification is a complicated process due to the interplay between multiple physico-chemical and hydrodynamic factors, especially in an energy-intensive ultrasound-assisted emulsification process. In this work, by mapping the physical processing parameters of ultrasound emulsification into a reduced domain that is governed by the power density and the initial average droplet diameter, a dimensionless parameter that resembles the dynamic breakup potential (η) was established via dimensional analysis. In addition to shedding important insights into the emulsification process, η further facilitates the establishment of a transient scaling relationship that is a function of the characteristic value (a) of the emulsion system.