Conjugates of amphotericin B to resolve challenges associated with its delivery.

Introduction: Amphotericin B (AmB), a promising antifungal and antileishmanial drug, acts on the membrane of microorganisms. The clinical use of AmB is limited due to issues associated with its delivery including poor solubility and bioavailability, instability in acidic media, poor intestinal permeability, dose and aggregation state dependent toxicity, parenteral administration, and requirement of cold chain for transport and storage, etc.

Areas Covered: Scientists have formulated and explored various covalent conjugates of AmB to reduce its toxicity with increase in solubility, oral bioavailability, and payload or loading of AmB by using various polymers, lipids, carbon-based nanocarriers, metallic nanoparticles, and vesicular carriers, etc.

Nanotheranostics for Diagnosis and Treatment of Breast Cancer.

Recently, breast cancer has reached the highest incident rate amongst all the reported cancers, and one of its variants, known as triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), is deadlier compared to the other types of breast cancer due to a lack of feasible diagnostic techniques. Advancements in nanotechnology have paved the way to formulate several nanocarriers with the ability to deliver anticancer drugs effectively and selectively to cancer cells with minimum side effects to non-cancerous cells. Nanotheranostics is a novel approach that can be used in the diagnosis of disease along with therapeutic effects.

PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway inhibitors in triple-negative breast cancer: a review on drug discovery and future challenges.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a highly malignant subtype of breast cancer associated with poor prognosis. Although conventional chemotherapy regimens have shown some effectiveness in early TNBC cases, the outcome in advanced stages is poor. The PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway is one of the important and active pathways involved in chemoresistance and survival of TNBC.

Application of a regional hurricane wind risk forecasting model for wood-frame houses.

Hurricane wind risk in a region changes over time due to changes in the number, type, locations, vulnerability, and value of buildings. A model was developed to quantitatively estimate changes over time in hurricane wind risk to wood-frame houses (defined in terms of potential for direct economic loss), and to estimate how different factors, such as building code changes and population growth, contribute to that change. The model, which is implemented in a simulation, produces a probability distribution of direct economic losses for each census tract in the study region at each time step in the specified time horizon.