Browsing by Issue Date, starting with "2017-03-21"
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- Strategies to Improve Cancer Photothermal Therapy Mediated by NanomaterialsPublication . Diogo, Duarte Miguel de Melo; Silva, Cleide Isabel Pais; Dias, Diana Rodrigues; Moreira, André; Correia, Ilídio Joaquim SobreiraThe deployment of hyperthermia‐based treatments for cancer therapy has captured the attention of different researchers worldwide. In particular, the application of light‐responsive nanomaterials to mediate hyperthermia has revealed promising results in several pre‐clinical assays. Unlike conventional therapies, these nanostructures can display a preferential tumor accumulation and thus mediate, upon irradiation with near‐infrared light, a selective hyperthermic effect with temporal resolution. Different types of nanomaterials such as those based on gold, carbon, copper, molybdenum, tungsten, iron, palladium and conjugated polymers have been used for this photothermal modality. This progress report summarizes the different strategies that have been applied so far for increasing the efficacy of the photothermal therapeutic effect mediated by nanomaterials, namely those that improve the accumulation of nanomaterials in tumors (e.g. by changing the corona composition or through the functionalization with targeting ligands), increase nanomaterials' intrinsic capacity to generate photoinduced heat (e.g. by synthesizing new nanomaterials or assembling nanostructures) or by optimizing the parameters related to the laser light used in the irradiation process (e.g. by modulating the radiation wavelength). Overall, the development of new strategies or the optimization and combination of the existing ones will surely give a major contribution for the application of nanomaterials in cancer PTT.
- Cosmic infinity: a dynamical system approachPublication . Bouhmadi Lopez, Mariam; Marto, João; Morais, João; Silva, César M.Dynamical system techniques are extremely useful to study cosmology. It turns out that in most of the cases, we deal with finite isolated fixed points corresponding to a given cosmological epoch. However, it is equally important to analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the universe. On this paper, we show how this can be carried out for 3-forms model. In fact, we show that there are fixed points at infinity mainly by introducing appropriate compactifications and defining a new time variable that washes away any potential divergence of the system. The richness of 3-form models allows us as well to identify normally hyperbolic non-isolated fixed points. We apply this analysis to three physically interesting situations: (i) a pre-inflationary era; (ii) an inflationary era; (iii) the late-time dark matter/dark energy epoch.