The applications of hydrogels in biomedical field has been since multiple decades. Discoveries in biology and chemistry render this platform endowed with much engineering potentials and growing continuously. Novel approaches in constructing these materials have led to the production of complex hybrid hydrogels systems that can incorporate both natural and synthetic polymers and other functional moieties for mediated cell response, tunable release kinetic profiles, thus they are used and research for diverse biomedical applications. Recent advancement in this field has established promising techniques for the development of biorelevant materials for construction of hybrid hydrogels with potential applications in the delivery of cancer therapeutics, drug discovery, and re-generative medicines. In this review, recent trends in advanced hybrid hydrogels systems incorporating nano/microstructures, their synthesis, and their potential applications in tissue engineering and anticancer drug delivery has been discussed. Examples of some new approaches including click reactions implementation, 3D printing, and photopatterning for the development of these materials has been briefly discussed. In addition, the application of biomolecules and motifs for desired outcomes, and tailoring of their transport and kinetic behavior for achieving desired outcomes in hybrid nanogels has also been reviewed.
15 March 2024 in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology
In recent years, stem cells and their secretomes, notably exosomes, have received considerable attention in biomedical applications. Exosomes are cellular secretomes used for intercellular communication. They perform the function of intercellular messengers by facilitating the transport of proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and therapeutic substances. Their biocompatibility, minimal immunogenicity, targetability, stability, and engineerable characteristics have additionally led to their application as drug delivery vehicles. The therapeutic efficacy of exosomes can be improved through surface modification employing functional molecules, including aptamers, antibodies, and peptides. Given their potential as targeted delivery vehicles to enhance the efficiency of treatment while minimizing adverse effects, exosomes exhibit considerable promise. Stem cells are considered advantageous sources of exosomes due to their distinctive characteristics, including regenerative and self-renewal capabilities, which make them well-suited for transplantation into injured tissues, hence promoting tissue regeneration. However, there are notable obstacles that need to be addressed, including immune rejection and ethical problems. Exosomes produced from stem cells have been thoroughly studied as a cell-free strategy that avoids many of the difficulties involved with cell-based therapy for tissue regeneration and cancer treatment. This review provides an in-depth summary and analysis of the existing knowledge regarding exosomes, including their engineering and cardiovascular disease (CVD) treatment applications.
28 February 2022 in Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences
Gastric cancer (GC) is the fourth most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death globally. Although the mortality rate in some parts of the world, such as East Asia, is still high, new treatments and lifestyle changes have effectively reduced deaths from this type of cancer. One of the main challenges of this type of cancer is its late diagnosis and poor prognosis. GC patients are usually diagnosed in the advanced stages of the disease, which is often associated with peritoneal metastasis (PM) and significantly reduces survival. This type of metastasis in patients with GC poses a serious challenge due to limitations in common therapies such as surgery and tumor resection, as well as failure to respond to systemic chemotherapy. To solve this problem, researchers have used virotherapy such as reovirus-based anticancer therapy in patients with GC along with PM who are resistant to current chemotherapies because this therapeutic approach is able to overcome immune suppression by activating dendritic cells (DCs) and eventually lead to the intrinsic activity of antitumor effector T cells. This review summarizes the immunopathogenesis of peritoneal metastasis of gastric cancer (PMGC) and the details for using virotherapy as an effective anticancer treatment approach, as well as its challenges and opportunities.
Severe trauma has the characteristics of complicated condition, multiple organs involved, limited auxiliary examinations, and difficulty in treatment. Most of the trauma patients were sent to primary hospitals to receive treatments. But the traditional mode of separate discipline management can easily lead to delayed treatment, missed or wrong diagnosis and high disability, which causes a high mortality in severe trauma patients. Therefore, if the primary hospitals, especially county-level hospitals (usually the top general hospital within the administrative region of a county), can establish a scientific and comprehensive trauma care system, the success rate of trauma rescue in this region can be greatly improved. On March 1st, 2013, Tiantai People's Hospital of Zhejiang Province, China set up a trauma care center, which integrated the pre-hospital and in-hospital trauma treatment procedures, and has achieved good economic and social benefits. Till March 1st, 2017, 1265 severe trauma patients (injury severity score >16) have been treated in this trauma center. The rescue success rate reached 95% and the delayed and/or missed diagnosis rate was less than 5%. Totally 86 severe cases of pelvic fractures with unstable hemodynamics were treated, and the success rate was 92%. The in-hospital emergency rescue response time is less than 3 min, and the time from definite diagnosis to surgery is within 35 min.
Autonomous medical rescue on high-altitude plateaus faces formidable challenges, as extreme environmental conditions, including hypobaric hypoxia, severe cold, and inaccessible terrain, critically degrade human physiological resilience and logistical accessibility. The "platinum 10 min" window becomes even more stringent, demanding rapid triage and precise resource allocation under severe infrastructure deficits. Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches struggle to reconcile discrete tactical maneuvering with the continuous precision required for medical resource allocation, leading to sub-optimal logistics and coarse treatment decisions. To address these limitations, we propose ISMRG2 mSAC (injury severity-medical resource collaborative guided multi-agent soft actor-critic), a framework integrating a hybrid discrete-continuous action space with a severity-aware attention mechanism. By leveraging a maximum entropy objective, ISMRG2 mSAC incentivizes diverse exploration strategies, mitigating premature convergence to local optima. The hybrid architecture facilitates a "micro-dosing" strategy, enabling agents to continuously modulate drug administration proportional to injury severity rather than relying on fixed dosages. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ISMRG2 mSAC achieves a survival rate of 84.2% and a drug efficiency ratio of 0.83, significantly outperforming baselines such as multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient and independent proximal policy optimization. Qualitative analysis further reveals that agents balance operational agility with safety, adopting a high-speed rescue policy that trades off marginal collision risk for superior mission completion time and logistical sustainability. The proposed ISMRG2 mSAC framework effectively bridges the gap between discrete maneuver control and continuous medical resource allocation in extreme high-altitude rescue scenarios. Its severity-aware attention mechanism and hybrid action space enable fine-grained, adaptive treatment decisions, yielding substantial improvements in both casualty survival and drug utilization efficiency over existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods.