Narrow Results

Since the discovery of cisplatin, drugs based on platinum, have made a significant impact on the treatment of various cancers. The administration of platinum drugs is however accompanied by significant side effects. This chapter discusses the types of drug delivery systems that have been developed in order to enable the targeted delivery while maintaining controlled temporal supply of the drug. The sizes of carriers range from nanometer to micrometer sized particles. The most common types of drug carriers are micelles, liposomes, nanoparticles, and dendrimers, but also a few microspheres have been developed. Most striking aspect of the delivery of platinum drugs is the possibility of physical encapsulation but also the binding of the drug to the polymer carrier coordinate covalent bond. Since platinum drugs have typically two permanent and two leaving ligands, the polymer can be part of either ligand. As the leaving ligand, the platinum drug is released often as cisplatin. If the polymer provides the functionality for the permanent ligand, a new macromolecular drug has been formed. In addition to the attachment of pt(II) drugs, recent offorts are devoted to the conjugation via the Pt((IV) prodrug.

Nanotechnology has become a distinctive field of research, aimed to modernize the way scientists have addressed urgent needs and sophisticated problems, towards the achievement of unprecedented discoveries. Amidst the myriad of materials extensively used in the modern society, carbon-based systems seem to embody a significant role especially where endurance and strength are required: carbon nanoparticles, nanotubes, graphite, diamonds and fullerenes et al. In addition to the above advantages, this review also emphasizes some concerns on the carbonnanosystems and which are mainly attributable to the lack of an exhaustive characterization and to the potential hazardous effects deriving from their potential accumulation in the environment and inside the body.

Nanostructured thin-film electrode materials are proposed for supercapacitors due to their outstanding performance over bulk materials. In this work, we fabricated a TiO₂ nanotube film over a titanium foil using a top-down approach for supercapacitor electrodes. We noticed that the fabricated nanotubes are uniform and well aligned, confirmed by FESEM; the TiO₂ nanotube parameters were further simulated using COMSOL Multiphysics. Simulations show an areal capacitance of 1.19393 pF/cm² with oxidation and reduction peak currents of 6.18921 × 10⁻¹⁵ A and −6.0320 × 10⁻¹⁵ A, respectively, at 10 mV/s scan rate. The as-prepared nanotubes show a poor areal capacitance of 1.0193 F/cm², which is improved to 12.8764 F/cm² at a scan rate of 10 mV/s, that is approximately 12.63 times with oxidation and reduction peak currents of 0.129 mA/cm² and −0.105 mA/cm², respectively, by performing an electrochemical etching. Further, the surface roughness of both as-prepared and etched samples is studied to comment on their surface area changes. The effect of the etched sample is studied, compared and validated with simulation, which reveals that the etched TiO₂ nanotubes thin-film sample shows considerable similarity with the simulation results.