Towards improved therapies using nanopharmaceuticals: recent patents on pharmaceutical nanoformulations.

Pharmaceutical formulations that contain nanosized drugs are perceived as "Nanopharmaceuticals" and offer significant benefit for the patient compared to the conventional formulated drugs. There are several advantages of nanoparticular drug formulations such as enhanced solubility and dissolution rate, enhanced oral bioavailability, improved dose proportionality, reduced food effects, suitability for administration by all routes and possibility of sterile filtration due to decreased particle size range. Several nanopharmaceuticals are successfully marketed. Different patented techniques are commercialized to prepare nanopharmaceuticals such as milling, homogenization and precipitation. The focus of the underlying review is to give an overview of those technologies for nanosizing active pharmaceutical ingredients and recently published patents in the field of nanosized pharmaceutics.

Toward understanding the mechanism of chromophore-assisted laser inactivation--evidence for the primary photochemical steps.

Chromophore-assisted laser inactivation (CALI) is a light-mediated technique used to selectively inactivate proteins of interest to elucidate their biological function. CALI has potential applications to a wide array of biological questions, and its efficiency allows for high-throughput application. A solid understanding of its underlying photochemical mechanism is still missing. In this study, we address the CALI mechanism using a simplified model system consisting of the enzyme beta-galactosidase as target protein and the common dye fluorescein. We demonstrate that protein photoinactivation is independent from dye photobleaching and provide evidence that the first singlet state of the chromophore is the relevant transient state for the initiation of CALI. Furthermore, the inactivation process was shown to be dependent on oxygen and likely to be based on photooxidation of the target protein via singlet oxygen. The simple model system used in this study may be further applied to identify and optimize other CALI chromophores.