Sharif Digital Repository

Particle retention and clearance is a major concern in the treatment of pulmonary diseases. Inhaled materials into the nasal and lung airways include gases/vapors, liquid droplets and soluble/insoluble particulate matter which can be toxic or therapeutic (or both). For example, nanoparticles (NPs), as part of nanomedicine, are now being used as drug carriers for passive and active targeting of solid tumors and inflamed tissue. However, natural and especially manmade NPs can also be harmful, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), asbestos fibers and ambient toxic pollutants, based on epidemiological and pathological studies of occupational and environmental exposures. In fact, ultrafine particles... 

The heart diseases and in particular coronary artery disease have been vastly increased in recent years. Bypass operation is the major recognized way of this disease treatment however, one third of patients don’t have the suitable autologous vein for this operation. It should be noted that for this operation a suitable conduit with diameter as narrow as possible is needed. On the other hand, usage of synthetic polymers won’t be suitable for this operation due to the coagulation forming. The only way to overcome this problem is the use of tissue engineering with the aid of scaffold and autologous cells with the natural tissue function, which reconstructed the desire tissue causing no... 

Uranium dioxide (UO2) has been widely used as nuclear fuel in water cooled reactors since 1960s. UO¬2 is a refractory oxide with a melting point in excess of 28000C and therefore, requires high sintering temperature around 17000C in a hydrogen atmosphere for several hours. In the conventional method, the sintering is incorporated with indirect heating of green pellets in a refractory-type electrical resistance furnace. This furnace, however, uses a large number of expensive heating elements and refractory materials to achieve and maintain the high temperature for a long time. Moreover, it consumes much electrical energy and time. Since nanocrystalline materials contain a large fraction of... 

Textile dyes are a major category of organic pollutants and release of them in the environment causes serious problems. Among the most commonly used methods for colored wastewater, advanced oxidation processes, especially the photocatalytic process, are rapidly developing as a new and effective solution. However, there is still a need for high-level photocatalytic activity and improvement of this process to increase removal efficiency. In this study, we have tried to provide a higher performance for color removal using carbon nitride photocatalyst. Accordingly, two approaches have been proposed to improve the removal of rhodamine b, as one of the common dyes in the textile industries. The... 

In recent years, it is expected that the fabrication of multilayer scaffolds and the use of different methodologies in one product can be a new progressing method in skin substitute production. Accordingly, this project aims to fabricate a bilayered composite scaffold with a combination of hydrogel and electrospinning method. We have tried to prepare a scaffold made of oxidized alginate (OAL), gelatin (G), and silk fibroin (SF) without using corrosive solvents and toxic crosslinking agents as a scaffold and drug delivery system. As different biological, chemical, physical, and mechanical factors play a vital role in the healing process, we have characterized the proposed scaffold via DSC,... 

Cancer is an abnormal growth of cells which is one of the major cause of worldwide’s mortality. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) are rare cancer cells released from the primary or metastatic tumors and transported though the peripheral circulatory system and spreads in body and seize healthy organs. Early detection of CTCs can help in overtaking the cancer, hence isolation of CTCs is an essential step for many therapeutics. In spite of its clinical potential, the isolation and detection of CTCs has been a challenging task due to its rare presence amongst other blood cells (as low as 1–10 CTCs per billions of blood cells), similarity to white blood cell in size and also variability in terms of... 

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a new class of biocompatible nanomaterials with high specific surface area, which provide the possibility of loading various therapeutic agents. Considering the few studies on the use of MOFs in melanoma cancer treatment, the main goal of this research is to investigate the loading and controlling the release of dacarbazine (DTIC) and also the interaction of DTIC and MOF structure in aqueous environments. Based on this, this study was done in three main parts. In the first part, several types of well-known and often used structures in the drug delivery field, including ZIF-8 (based on zinc), MIL-101-NH2(Fe), and MIL-100(Fe) (both based on iron), were... 

New methods of cancer treatment are always the attention of researchers all over the world, among which the photothermal treatment method is of particular importance. In addition to being easy, this treatment method has the least invasiveness. Studies have shown that combining this method with other methods such as chemotherapy not only can be very effective in destroying tumor tissue, but can significantly reduce the side effects of chemotherapy drugs.In order to apply the photothermal treatment method, an effective photothermal agent is needed. Molybdenum disulfide nanosheets have performed successfully in this field, which have been of great interest, due to their high efficiency in... 

Polycaprolactone (PCL) scaffolds and its composites containing bioactive glass particles (45S5) and TiO2 nanostructures with pre-defined and controlled external and internal architecture were prepared via an indirect three-dimensional (3D) printing process. The scaffolds had an interconnected structure with macro- (400-500 μm) and micro- (~25 μm) pores. Bioactivity, mechanical behavior and kinetics of tissue growth in 3D scaffolds were studied. The size effect of biogactive glass particles (6 μm, 250 nm, <100 nm) and morphology of titania nanostructures (spherical, tube, leaf-like, and flower-like particles) were elaborated. The biogactive glass particles with different sizes were prepared... 

Today, human is facing and struggling with one of the most deadly disease, Cancer. Accordingly, several research studies are aimed to develop new anticancer drugs. Among the prescribed drugs are Paclitaxel. Unfortunately, despite the anticancer activity, paclitaxel has very low water solubility. To solve this problem several alternatives have been proposed by researchers, e.g. using co-solvents of ethanol:Cremophor El®, as is the case in commercial drug, Taxol®. Unfortunately, these co-solvents have some dangerous and sometimes mortal side effects. To reduce its side effects, researchers have proposed using cyclodextrin as a carrier for paclitaxel on the basis that cyclodextrin has a... 

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques are gaining more attention worldwide as the proved oil is declining and the oil price is hiking. Although many giant oil reservoirs around the world were already screened for EOR processes, the main challenges such as low sweep efficiency, costly techniques, possible formation damages, transportation of huge amounts of EOR agents to the fields especially for offshore cases and the lack of analyzing tools in traditional experimental works, hinder the proposed EOR process.It has been shown that recently, nanoparticles are attractive agents to enhance the oil recovery at the laboratory scale.
In this study TiO2 nanoparticles were used to improve... 

Considering the limitations of fossil fuels in recent years, as well as increasing demand for biofuels, it is anticipated that future attention to biofuels will increase further. Among biofuels, due to some disadvantages of bioethanol and biodiesel fuel, there is a tendency to use biobutanol, which does not have the disadvantages of the mentioned fuels. The cost of chemical production of butanol also led researchers to use biotechnology production of butanol. According to studies, butanol production can be achieved by fermenting some sugars such as glucose, xylose, and ... by anaerobic microorganism, but the cost of using these sugars has resulted in the use of natural sources of these... 

Physical processes such as adsorption and membrane filtration are in progress and considered as efficient methods in separation and treatment of organic pollutants from petrochemical and colored wastewaters. The advantages of these methods include high energy efficiency, low cost, facile process, and regeneration and implementation ability for a wide range of contaminants. Nevertheless,requirement of suitable materials as adsorbents with high adsorption capacity, capability of preparing membranes based on these materials, optimization of process conditions and removal improvement have still remained as the main challenges; therefore, these topics have been mentioned as main aims of this... 

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a process in which a special piece of a gene is amplified millions of times over a short period. This method has been of paramount importance in different fields of research and has been applied for different applications. PCR requires thermal cycling, or repeated temperature changes between two or three discrete temperatures to amplify specific nucleic acid target sequences. To achieve such thermal cycling, conventional bench-top thermal cyclers generally use a metal heating block powered by Peltier elements or benefit from forced convection heat transfer. Due to the fact that these methods are time consuming, it seems that design and fabrication of a fast... 

The membrane bioreactor (MBR) as an alternative method for simultaneous biodegradation and separation of oily water has received more attention, recently. Normally the MBR works at ambient temperature; therefore, the yield of biodegradation recalcitrant components is low. Increasing temperature improves the efficiency of degradation and reduces the amount of produced sludge. In this study the performance of an aerobic thermophilic and mesophilic membrane bioreactor (MBR) for treating oily wastewater has been investigated. In batch conditions (without applying the membrane), a comparison between COD removal in mesophilic and thermophilic conditions was done. In thermophilic conditions COD and... 

Cell lysis, as the first procedure of cell pretreatment, is a process that breaks cell membranes open thereby facilitating access to intracellular substances, such as DNA, proteins, and other components for further analysis to diagnose and treat diseases at early stages. Currently, there are several methods for cell lysis at macroscales. However, the time-consuming and expensive procedures as well as the large scal of the system are the main disadvantages of the systems. Recently, microfluidic systems have attracted considerable attention due to advantages associated with automation, integration and miniaturization of biomedical test protocols. Centrifugal microfluidics (Lab-on-a-Disc) is a... 

Natural tissues of body consist of Extra Cellular Matrix (ECM) and cells. Scaffold produces a temporary matrix for cells and facilitates oxygen and nutrients transport which enhances tissue regeneration. Therefore, attempts in regeneration of tissues and organs by scaffolds attracted great interest in today’s researchs. Choosing scaffold fabrication method and its polymer type, play a key role in scaffold specifications as they determine scaffold properties. In this project electrospinning was chosen as the scaffold fabrication method which is because of the unique properties of scaffolds fabricated by this method and also its ability in producing micro and nano fibers. At first set of... 

Treatment of critical-size bone defects caused by sport injuries, accidents, trauma, infection, and osteoporosis remains a major clinical challenge. In order to repair or regenerate large bone defects, bioactive three-dimensional scaffolds play a key role due to their multilevel porous structure, high surface area, enhanced mass transport and diffusion. Many studies reported that macropore diameters greater than 500 µm can lead to vascularized bone tissue. In this study, a hierarchically porous composite scaffold was prepared. Hierarchically porous silk fibroin- bioactive glass composite and fibroin scaffold were fabricated with controlled architecture and interconnected structure with... 

To develop a novel cell culture method for enhancement of bone marrow stromal cell growth and infiltration into the 3d electrospun PCL-based scaffold, we utilized the RPM system to simulate microgravity. In current study, six different scaffolds are produced using the electrospinningelectrospraying technique. These scaffolds are compared based on their structural (average diameter and SEM micrographs), mechanical (Tensile strength, elongation and wettability) and biological (Biodegradability, bioactivity, biocompatibility, cell adhesion, cell infiltration and antibacterial quality) characteristics. It is noted that the porous nano-hydroxyapatite/titanium hydroxide/polycaprolactone...