Farzin Abbaspour

Cancer is one of the major malignant diseases in the world. Current anti tumor agents are restricted during the chemotherapy due to their poor solubility in aqueous media, multidrug resistance problems, cytotoxicity, and serious side effects to healthy tissues. Development of targeted drug nanocarriers would enhance the undesirable effects of anticancer drugs and also selectively deliver them to cancerous tissues. Variety of nanocarriers such as micelles, polymeric nanoparticles, liposomes nanogels, dendrimers, and carbon nanotubes have been used for targeted delivery of anticancer agents. These nanocarriers transfer loaded drugs to desired sites through passive or active efficacy mechanisms. Chitosan and its derivatives, due to their unique properties such as hydrophilicity, biocompatibility, and biodegradability, have attracted attention to be used in nanocarriers. Grafting cancer-specific ligands onto the Chitosan nanoparticles, which leads to ligand-receptor interactions, has been successfully developed as active targeting. Chitosan-conjugated components also respond to external or internal physical and chemical stimulus in targeted tumors that is called environment triggers. In this study, mechanisms of targeted tumor deliveries via nanocarriers were explained; specifically, chitosan-based nanocarriers in tumor-targeting drug delivery were also discussed.

The oily seeds are one of the main components of tomato processing wastes which contain the excellent quality of fatty oils, therefore recycling of these by-products is of interest from either environmental viewpoint due to reduction of potential contaminant charge, or nutritional perspective since the health benefits derived from their bio-active compounds. Pretreatment of oily seeds is one of the main processes of their oil extraction, leading to considerable increase in oil extraction efficiency. The results of this study showed that using combination of ultrasound pretreatment with other physical methods could weaken the particle surface bonds and enhance the extraction yield effectively. The highest improvement in oil extraction from tomato waste seeds was about 28.11% by using ground waste seeds with hot water immersion (25-40C 0 ) and ultrasound (at 550w, 37kHz 90 min). Although the ultrasound pretreatment didn’t affect the fatty acids structure and physicochemical

In this article, various methods including soxhlet, Bligh & Dyer (B&D), and ultrasonic-assisted B&D were investigated for the extraction of lipid from algal species Chlorella vulgaris. Relative polarity/water content and impolar per polar ratios of solvents were considered to optimize the relative proportions of each triplicate agent by applying the response surface method (RSM). It was found that for soxhlet, hexane-methanol (54-46%, respectively) with total lipid extraction of 14.65% and chloroform-methanol (54-46%, respectively) with the extraction of 19.87% lipid were the best set of triplicate where further addition of acetone to the first group and ethanol to the second group did not contributed to further extraction. In B&D, however, chloroform-methanol-water (50%-35%-15%, respectively) reached the all-time maximum of 24%. Osmotic shock as well as ultrasonication contributed to 3.52% of further extraction, which is considered to promote the total yield up to almost 15%. From the growth data and fatty acid analysis, the applied method was assessed to be appropriate for biodiesel production with regard to selectivity and extraction yield.