In the Field of Biomedicine

Unlike aluminium, calcium has a munber of stable isotopes plus a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about a year. The AMS studies using Ca has potential in the study of bone loss. The hmnan calcium metabolism including bone resorption with Ca tracer has been measured by Freeman et al. (1997). The other longer-lived isotope is Ni = 1.1 x 10 years) which can be used as a tracer for bioscience applications. Ni (ti/2 = 100 years) is produced in copper samples via the Cu(n, p) Ni reaction. 

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Hydrogels have numerous applications in the field of biomedicine because, as it has been previously indicated, their characteristics can be modulated in terms... 

The polypyrrole (Ppy)/dextrin nanocomposite is synthesised via in situ polymerisation and the preparation of this nanocomposite is shown in Figure 5.4. The backbone chain of this nanocomposite polymer contains hydrophobic side chains, which disrupt the microbial cell membrane leading to leakage of the cytoplasm in bacteria including Escherichia coli. Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus subtilis. This material can be implemented in the fields of biomedicine, biosensors and food packaging due to the biodegradable property of dextrin as well as the antibacterial properties of the Ppy [79]. 

Intriguingly, some of the properties of LMWGs, such as biodegradabihty, biocompatibility, and gende physical and chemical profiles, represent considerable potential in the fields of biomedicinal applications and drug delivery [58-62]. For this purpose, amphiphilic 3,4,5-trihydroxybenzoic derivatives with linkers of different lengths (26a, 26b, Fig. 3.23) were developed by us [63]. The compounds 26a and 26b with two naked -COOH are able to gel in aqueous ethanol, meanwhile, they can trap a great amount of tetracycline hydrochloride (TH) in gel tissue. In the presence of BSA or amino acids, TH could be controUably released into water solution. 

Perfectly branched dendrimers have potentially better properties for applications in the field of biomedicine than hyperbranched polymers due to their well-defined and predictable structure and narrow mass distribution, which is important for in vitro and in vivo applications. However, hyperbranched polymers have one very significant advantage, which is their easier preparation by a one-step synthesis. Therefore, hyperbranched polymers are also used in technical applications, for example, as additives, blends, or coating components and as multifunctional cross-linkers. But both, dendrimers and hyperbranched polymers, have been extensively studied in the fields of encapsulation and delivery of drugs, dyes, and genes because of their original branched architecture (Fig. 5.15). Small molecules of interest can be incorporated in the interior cavities of dendritic molecules or bound to their outer functional groups. 

For the study of the formation of adducts to macromolecules in animals and in humans, accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) has been introduced in the field of biomedicine. It is based on the use of a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator and was developed 20 years ago to measure very small quantities of rare isotopes, such as in C dating studies, e.g., for the Shroud of Turin. This technique is now... 

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