Clinical Application Fields

Several liposome-based drugs have been approved for clinical application [64]. One of the clinically approved liposomes is Doxil, a PEGylated liposome containing doxorubicin (DOX), which is used for the treatment of a number of diseases [65]. As shown in this case, in the field of liposome drug development, PEG is widely used to protect the liposome from recognition by opsonins, thereby reducing liposome clearance. 

Progress in the field of drug targeting has been slow till thirty years ago. With the advent of the monoclonal antibody technology in the mid seventies of the last century as well as the development of liposomal devices as carriers did the drug targeting field expand and did the clinical application become a feasible aim. 

Research in the field of ultrasound contrast materials will develop in two basic directions - the simple and the complex . The simple would mean wider clinical application of the store of available (or to-be-approved) contrast agents in clinical diagnostics. The success will depend not only on the quality of the new diagnostic procedures and results of the clinical trials with new ultrasound... 

Two clinical applications have validated the field of gene therapy. The first involves ex vivo transfer of a gene that encodes for... 

Of these the last one has been most widely used, since heparin-modified polymeric materials exhibit the highest and by today unsurpassed effects of thromboresistance enhancement. Many of these materials have not only proved to be potent in trials on animals, but have already found clinical application. These achievements have stimulated continuous interest in heparin-containing polymers (HCP) which is best manifested by listing the investigations performed in the field in recent years and still under way. They involve the new procedures for the synthesis of HCP providing minimal loss of activity of bound heparin, the studies of interactions of HCP with blood and its individual components, as well as on the mechanism of enhanced thromboresistance of HCP, and the search for new tasks for HCP. 

We hope the book has conveyed a compelling picture of the vast potential of Raman spectroscopy which recent applications and instrumentation advances have unlocked. Many areas within these specialist biomedical and pharmaceutical fields are rapidly progressing from academic research environments to implementation as solutions to practical problems. In the pharmaceutical industry this process is well advanced. The march into the biomedical area is underway and further penetration into clinical applications appears imminent. 

We, the volume editors, hope that this book will become a helpful resource for students, as well as for the advanced scientist, by providing a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and future promise of nucleic acid transfection for research and clinical applications. As of today, this exciting field is undoubtedly far from being comprehensively explored, and technological advances will provide even better transfection tools for basic and applied research as well as for the treatment of diseases. 

In the past 15 years, an extensive amount of preclinical data has been on the reparative potential of cell transplantation in acute and chronic myocardial injury. Since the first preclinical report of functional repair after the injection of autologous skeletal myoblasts into the injured heart in 1998 (7), a variety of cell types or combinations (Table I) have been proposed for transplantation during different stages of CVD (19). Preclinical data has been promising, and in at least one study, the amount of repair achieved with cell transplantation in HF is additive to current medical treatment (20). With the first cardiac clinical application in 2001 (8), the field rapidly moved from bench to bedside, and at present, we are gaining valuable information about the questions to ask and the early answers from both animal and human studies. To date, 19 clinical trials either in AMI (Table 2) or chronic HF have been published (21) (Table 3), including 13, where BM... 

It is anticipated that in the coming years, a number of HA-derivatives will appear for clinical application in Dermatology that contain cross-linked HA polymers as well as HA-ester derivatives obtained by the conjugation of the carboxylic acid of HA with various drugs in their alcohol forms. The HA polymer, because of its intrinsic biocompatibility, reactivity, and degradability, will have many uses in the rapidly expanding field of tissue engineering and in the tissue substitutes of the future. 

Calorimeters are instruments used for the direct measurement of heat quantities including heat production rates and heat capacities. Different measurement principles are employed and a very large number of calorimetric designs have been described since the first calorimetric experiments were reported more than 200 years ago. The amount of heat evolved in a chemical reaction is proportional to the amount of material taking part in the reaction and the heat production rate the thermal power, is proportional to the rate of the reaction. Calorimeters can therefore be employed as quantitative analytical instruments and in kinetic investigations, in addition to their use as thermodynamic instruments. Important uses of calorimeters in the medical field are at present in research on the biochemical level and in studies of living cellular systems. Such investigations are often linked to clinical applications but, so far, calorimetric techniques have hardly reached a state where one may call them clinical (analytical) instruments. ... 

There are many crucial activities which must be completed during or in parallel to each of these phases, such as application testing, HSE studies, product registration and customer, clinical or field trials, these are discussed in greater detail in subsequent sections. If all the steps were carried out in a sequential manner, the time from start to finish would be inordinately long. This is never the case, most of the steps overlap and the big issue of the management of time in the overall project is covered in Section D, 2.3. 

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