Soumya Narayana, B.H. Jaswanth Gowda, Umme Hani, Mohammed Gulzar Ahmed Ā· 6 authors
Hydrogels are innovative materials characterized by a water-swollen, crosslinked polymeric network capable of retaining substantial amounts of water while maintaining structural integrity. Their unique ability to swell or contract in response to environmental stimuli makes them integral to biomedical applications, including drug delivery, tissue engineering, and wound healing. Among these, "smart" hydrogels, sensitive to stimuli such as pH, temperature, and light, showcase reversible transitions between liquid and semi-solid states. Thermoresponsive hydrogels, exemplified by poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM), are particularly notable for their sensitivity to temperature changes, transitioning near their lower critical solution temperature (LCST) of approximately 32 Ā°C in water. Structurally, PNIPAM-based hydrogels (PNIPAM-HYDs) are chemically versatile, allowing for modifications that enhance biocompatibility and functional adaptability. These properties enable their application in diverse therapeutic areas such as cancer therapy, phototherapy, wound healing, and tissue engineering. In this review, the unique properties and behavior of smart PNIPAM are explored, with an emphasis on diverse synthesis methods and a brief note on biocompatibility. Furthermore, the structural and functional modifications of PNIPAM-HYDs are detailed, along with their biomedical applications in cancer therapy, phototherapy, wound healing, tissue engineering, skin conditions, ocular diseases, etc. Various delivery routes and patents highlighting therapeutic advancements are also examined. Finally, the future prospects of PNIPAM-HYDs remain promising, with ongoing research focused on enhancing their stability, responsiveness, and clinical applicability. Their continued development is expected to revolutionize biomedical technologies, paving the way for more efficient and targeted therapeutic solutions.
Abdullah Lakhan, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Dheyaa Ahmed Ibrahim, Karrar Hameed Abdulkareem
Due to emerging developments in sports games, the usage of bio-ankle sensors has been growing progressively. Whereas, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is an emerging network that boosts bio-inspired sensorsā performances onto the fog-cloud network. However, a sequence of processes is required to complete the healthcare process for one sportsman. Therefore, workflow-enabled bio-inspired sensors tasks scheduled in IoMT postures different challenges. For instance, cost-efficient scheduling, security, and data validation in distributed hospitals to share their data. In this paper, we devise bio-inspired robotics-enabled schemes in the blockchain-fog-cloud-assisted IoMT environment. The goal is to minimize execution cost and blockchain of applications. Based on the proposed system, the study devises bio-inspired robotics function blockchain task scheduling (BIR-FBTS) schemes, determining the optimal assignment of tasks to the available nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed methods minimized 50% of the service cost and 40% of mined cost in the system compared to all existing bio-inspired healthcare systems.
Since its inception in the late 2000s, blockchain has emerged as a powerful tool for creating trust without intermediaries to incentivize global communities for working for a common goal, such as the improvement of its very ecosystem, its applications and community adoption. While first blockchains were mainly devised for confirming transactions of their innate cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, smart-contract blockchains like Ethereum can interface with the real-world through so-called “oracles”, which feed trustful off-chain information. This paper introduces digital twins of physical objects and processes as computational oracles to effectively unleash the tremendous opportunity offered by blockchain to the realm of fundamental science, research and technology development (RTD). The crowdsourcing concept is illustrated with the example of centrifugal flow control in microfluidic “Lab-on-a-Disc” (LoaD) systems.
Open access
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Rachael N. Parker, Dana M. Cairns, Wenyao A. Wu, Kathryn E. Jordan Ā· 8 authors
Three-dimensional organoid tissue culture models are a promising approach for the study of biological processes including diseases. Advances in these tissue culture technologies improve in vitro analysis compared to standard 2D cellular approaches and are more representative of the physiological environment. However, a major challenge associated with organoid systems stems from the laborious processing involved in the analysis of large numbers of organoids. Here the design, characterization, and application of silk-elastin-like protein-based smart carrier arrays for processing organoids is presented. Fabrication of hydrogel-based carrier systems at room temperature result in organized arrays of organoids that maintain tissue culture plate orientation and could be processed simultaneously for histology. The system works by transfer of the organoids to the hydrogel arrays after which the material is subjected to 65 Ā°C to induce hydrogel contraction to secure the organoids, resulting in multisample constructs and allowing for placement on a microscope slide. Histological processing and immunostaining of these arrayed cerebral organoids analyzed within the contracted silk-elastin-like proteins (SELP) show retention of native organoid features compared to controls without the hydrogel carrier system, thus avoiding any artifacts. These SELP carriers present a useful approach for improving efficiency of scaled organoid screening and processing.