Despite great efforts and advancement in the treatment of cancer, tumor recurrence and metastasis remain significant challenges and demand novel therapy strategies. Recently, advances in biomaterials and drug delivery systems have facilitated the development of the local therapy of cancer, among which electrospun nanofibrous scaffolds show great promise owing to their porous structure, relatively large surface area, high drug loading capacity, similarity with the native extracellular matrix, and possibility of the combination of various therapies. Here, we review this rapidly developing field of electrospun nanofibrous scaffolds as a drug delivery system for cancer local therapy, in particular addressing stimuli-responsive drug release, as well as its combination with stem cell and immune therapy. Challenges and future perspectives are also discussed.
Using Fiber as the based material for photocatalyst particles is favorable for their recovery, thereby avoiding the photocatalyst particles cause secondary pollution to water environment. In this work, the AgBr and Ag3PO4 photocatalyst particles were loaded onto the surface of chitosan fiber (CF) via chelation and in situ anion-exchange method. The photocatalytic results illustrated that the AgBr/Ag3PO4/CF composites displayed the best photocatalytic performance when the mass ratio of Ag3PO4 and AgBr onto the CF was approximately 1:0.15, their degradation rate can reach 98.1% for the methyl orange (MO) solution, this value far exceeded those of pure CF, AgBr/CF composites, and Ag3PO4/CF composites. Besides, the AgBr/Ag3PO4/CF composites also shown excellent durability, after the fifth cycle, they still maintained a decolorization rate of 86.4% for the MO solution, while the Ag3PO4/CF composites maintained a decolorization rate of only 70.7%. Based on these results, we consider that the AgBr/Ag3PO4/CF composites have high practical interest in environmental remediation.
The health benefits and sensing applications of curcumin-based systems depend on their prevailing photophysical and chemical properties at a specific environment—the characteristic low solubility of curcumin in water hinders high-dosage based applications. To circumvent this drawback, curcumin has been incorporated in hydrophobic environments in nanoscale. Herein, electrospun fibers of Eudragit L100 were loaded with curcumin and applied in fluorescence and antibacterial assays to evaluate prevailing physical and chemical properties in solid-state. The characteristic high loading degree of curcumin (250 mg/mL in Eudragit L100 solution) preserves not only the photophysical properties of molecules (such as the intrinsic fluorescence) but also the antibacterial activity of released molecules from electrospun fibers, characterizing an important strategy for improvement in the applicability potential of natural materials.
Wearable devices have received tremendous interests in human sweat analysis in the past few years. However, the widely used polymeric substrates and the layer-by-layer stacking structures greatly influence the cost-efficiency, conformability and breathability of the devices, further hindering their practical applications. Herein, we report a facile and low-cost strategy for the fabrication of a skin-friendly thread/paper-based wearable system consisting of a sweat reservoir and a multi-sensing component for simultaneous in situ analysis of sweat pH and lactate. In the system, hydrophilic silk thread serves as the micro-channel to guide the liquid flow. Filter papers were functionalized to prepare colorimetric sensors for lactate and pH. The smartphone-based quantitative analysis shows that the sensors are sensitive and reliable. Although pH may interfere the lactate detection, the pH detected simultaneously could be employed to correct the measured data for the achievement of a precise lactate level. After being integrated with a hydrophobic arm guard, the system was successfully used for the on-body measurement of pH and lactate in the sweats secreted from the volunteers. This low-cost, easy-to-fabricate, light-weight and flexible thread/paper-based microfluidic sensing device may hold great potentials as a wearable system in human sweat analysis and point-of-care diagnostics.
Warp sizing is considered as the most important process of weaving preparation in the textile field. The quality of sized warp yarns is directly determined by the permeation and coating of sizing paste into/on warp yarns. However, many significant flaws of the current method of permeability and coating property of sizing paste, such as low accuracy and narrow variety adaptability for sizing agents and warp yarns, have emerged in the evaluation process. In order to eliminate the inherent flaws in the current method, the investigation chose chitosan (CS) as a representative of common sizing agents, introduced various amounts of perylene units onto molecular chains of the CS, and prepared a new functional sizing agent—fluorescent CS with different labeling degrees of perylene. Furthermore, PVA-perylene was synthesized to evaluate the permeability and coating property of PVA sizing paste. Then, three indexes to indicate the permeability and coating property of sizing paste, i.e. permeation percentage, coating percentage and integrity percentage of sizing film, were evaluated using the CS-perylene and PVA-perylene derivatives prepared. Due to the fluorescence emitted by the perylene units, the three indexes can be determined accurately and conveniently depending on only fluorescent microscope and common image processing software. The investigation efficiently solves the difficult problem of evaluating permeation and coating property of the pastes of both bio-based and petroleum-based sizing agents with appropriate degrees of labeling and has a significant guiding function on accurate determination of the quality of sized yarns.