Publications by authors named "Serena Casanova"

Asthma is defined as severe when it is uncontrolled despite the high intensity of treatment, or that loses control when a therapeutic step down is tried.These patients, for years, have been "uniformly" treated with massive doses of inhaled and oral corticosteroids regardless of their inflammatory state.Initially, asthma was considered of genesis "exclusively allergic.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Mepolizumab and benralizumab are clinically effective biological treatments for severe eosinophilic asthmatic patients by hampering eosinophilic inflammation. The effects of these compound on the immunoglobulin (Ig)E T2 component are virtually unknown.

Objectives: To evaluate the change in total IgE levels at 4 ± 2 months after initiation of the mepolizumab (primary outcome) or benralizumab.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The rejection of particles with different charges and sizes, ranging from a few Ångstroms to tens of nanometers, is key to a wide range of industrial applications, from wastewater treatment to product purification in biotech processes. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have long held the promise to revolutionize filtration, with orders of magnitude higher fluxes compared to commercial membranes. CNTs, however, can only reject particles and ions wider than their internal diameter.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The independent effect of nanotube surface chemistry and structure on the flow of water under nanoscale confinement is demonstrated in this paper for the first time via the synthesis of novel carbon nitride nanotube (CNNT) membranes. Using a combination of experiments and high-fidelity molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, it is shown here that the hydrophilization of the sp carbon structure, induced by the presence of the C-N bonds, decreases the pure water permeance in CNNTs when compared with pristine and turbostratic carbon nanotubes (CNTs). The MD simulations are based on a model true to the chemical structure of the synthesized nanotubes, built from spectroscopy measurements and calibrated potentials using droplet experiments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF