Mayur Mahendrakumar Patel

Breast cancer (BC) is a prevalent and life-threatening disease that demands effective diagnostic and therapeutic solutions. Despite advancements in treatments such as chemotherapy, current approaches often involve invasive techniques that may cause significant patient discomfort and side effects. Microneedles offer a promising alternative for both BC diagnosis and treatment, providing minimally invasive sampling and targeted drug delivery. Microneedles bypass the gastrointestinal and metabolic barriers associated with traditional drug administration, allowing direct delivery of therapeutic agents to BC tissues while minimizing systemic toxicity. There are various microneedles types: solid, coated, dissolving, hollow, and hydrogel-forming. Microneedles exhibit unique mechanisms for delivering drugs and detecting BC biomarkers. Advances in microneedles materials and fabrication methods, including polymers, ceramics, metals, and biocompatible substances, enhance microneedles efficiency and safety. Microneedles have also been applied in BC immunotherapy, chemotherapy, and photothermal and photodynamic therapies, demonstrating high efficacy in tumour reduction, survival improvement, and reduced side effects in preclinical models. While microneedles show substantial potential, challenges such as variability in skin penetration, mechanical strength, and clinical scalability must be addressed. Continued research and clinical trials are essential to optimize microneedle technology for future BC management, potentially revolutionizing non-invasive cancer care. An extensive literature review has been carried out on microneedles for BC diagnosis and treatment horizons using ScienceDirect, PubMed and Google Scholar from 2009 to 2025. using Science Direct, PubMed and Google Scholar from 2009 to 2025.

Curcumin, an excellent anti-inflammatory, anti-infectious, antioxidant, and angiogenesis-promoting agent, holds immense potential for treating chronic wounds. However, rapid metabolism, low solubility, low permeability, and toxicity at higher concentrations hinder its therapeutic efficacy. The current therapeutic alternatives are inefficient in healing chronic wounds and often lead to severe infection, amputation, and mortality. There is a dire need for a novel therapeutic drug delivery system to address the challenges associated with chronic wounds. Nanotechnology holds immense potential to aid wound healing by improving permeability, bioavailability, and solubility; preventing degradation in the chronic wound microenvironment, and increasing the therapeutic potential of the drug. The research aimed to develop and optimize curcumin-incorporated nanostructured lipid carriers (CUR-NLCs) with high entrapment efficiency, improved stability, prolonged drug release profile, and particle size suitable for wound healing (100–200 nm). This work differs from previously reported CUR-NLCs, as systematic optimization is performed for CUR-NLCs fabricated using the high-pressure homogenization (HPH) technique. HPH offers unique advantages of scalability, reproducibility, high drug entrapment, solvent-free preparation, and narrow particle size distribution. The CUR-NLCs were optimized by applying a Box–Behnken design (3 factors, 3 levels) utilizing drug concentration, co-surfactant concentration, and high-speed homogenizer speed as independent variables and particle size, entrapment efficiency, and drug loading as dependent variables. The optimized CUR-NLCs identified using the desirability approach (D = 1) had a particle size of 145.2 ± 1.3 nm, a polydispersity index of 0.233 ± 0.06, a zeta potential of −30.4 ± 2.8 mV, and a good entrapment efficiency of 81.64% ± 2.0%. The in vitro drug release studies depicted a prolonged release of CUR up to 48 hours, which will help to target the inflammatory phase of wound healing, prevent chronic inflammation, and accelerate the transition to the proliferation phase. The release kinetics results indicated that the Weibull model provided the best fit (R2 = 0.994), explaining the combined diffusion and dissolution-dependent drug release. The optimized CUR-NLCs were stable under varied storage conditions. The research findings demonstrate that the optimized CUR-NLCs could be further employed as a promising alternative for chronic wound management.

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major global health challenge, aggravated by limitations of current chemotherapeutic regimens, including poor oral bioavailability, systemic side effects, and patient noncompliance. This study aimed to develop and evaluate macrophage-targeted, mannose-conjugated solid lipid nanoparticles (Mn-ETB-SNs) for enhanced oral delivery of ethylbutol (ETB), a first-line anti-TB drug. The Mn-ETB SNs were fabricated using high-pressure homogenization followed by surface mannosylation through Schiff's base formation between mannose and amine-functionalized nanoparticles. The prepared formulations were characterized for particle size, ζ-potential, drug loading, entrapment efficiency, morphology, and stability. In vitro release, GI stability, cytotoxicity, and cellular uptake studies using J774A.1 macrophages were conducted. Further, in vivo pharmacokinetic and biodistribution studies were performed in Sprague-Dawley rats. The optimized Mn-ETB-SNs exhibited a uniform particle size of approximately 491 nm, a high entrapment efficiency of around 84%, and spherical morphology with stable physicochemical properties under varied storage and GI conditions. Mannosylation significantly enhanced macrophage uptake by 2.02-fold compared to unconjugated nanoparticles, as confirmed through fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) and fluorescence microscopy. In vivo pharmacokinetic studies demonstrated an 8.5-fold increase in ETB bioavailability with Mn-ETB-SNs compared to the pure drug, accompanied by prolonged circulation and reduced hepatic metabolism. Biodistribution analysis revealed preferential and sustained lung accumulation, with Mn-ETB-SNs achieving 4.74-fold higher pulmonary concentrations at 48 h compared to free drug, owing to mannose receptor-mediated uptake by alveolar macrophages. Collectively, the findings highlight the potential of orally administered Mn-ETB-SNs as a promising nanocarrier system for targeted TB therapy. The developed formulation offers improved bioavailability, site-specific drug delivery, and enhanced pulmonary targeting, addressing key limitations of conventional TB treatment.

Formulation and Optimization of Pyrazinamide-Loaded Solid Lipid Nanoparticles by Employing a Design of Experiments Approach - Turkish Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Wound healing is a complex and dynamic physiological process consisting of a series of cellular and molecular events that initiate immediately after a tissue lesion, to reconstruct the skin layer. It is indubitable that patients with chronic wounds, severely infected wounds, or any metabolic disorder of the wound microenvironment always endure severe pain and discomfort that affect their quality of life. It is essential to treat chronic wounds for conserving the physical as well as mental well-being of affected patients and for convalescing to improve their quality of life. For supporting and augmenting the healing process, the selection of pertinent wound dressing is essential. A substantial reduction in healing duration, disability, associated cost, and risk of recurrent infections can be achieved via engineering wound dressings. Hydrogels play a leading role in the path of engineering ideal wound dressings. Hydrogels, comprising water to a large extent, providing a moist environment, being comfortable to patients, and having biocompatible and biodegradable properties, have found their success as suitable wound dressings in the market. The exploitation of hydrogels is increasing perpetually after substantiation of their broader therapeutic actions owing to their resemblance to dermal tissues, their capability to stimulate partial skin regeneration, and their ability to incorporate therapeutic moieties promoting wound healing. This review entails properties of hydrogel supporting wound healing, types of hydrogels, cross-linking mechanisms, design considerations, and formulation strategies of hydrogel engineering. Various categories of hydrogel wound dressing fabricated recently are discussed based on their gel network composition, degradability, and physical and chemical cross-linking mechanisms, which provide an outlook regarding the importance of tailoring the physicochemical properties of hydrogels. The examples of marketed hydrogel wound dressings are also incorporated along with the future perspectives and challenges associated with them.

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier (B_CSF) are two of the most complex and sophisticated concierges that defend the central nervous system (CNS) by numerous mechanisms. While they maintain the neuro-ecological homeostasis through the regulated entry of essential biomolecules, their conservative nature challenges the entry of most of the drugs intended for CNS delivery. Targeted delivery challenges for a diverse spectrum of therapeutic agents/drugs (non-small molecules, small molecules, gene-based therapeutics, protein and peptides, antibodies) are diverse and demand specialized delivery and disease-targeting strategies. This review aims to capture the trends that have shaped the current brain targeting research scenario. This review discusses the physiological, neuropharmacological, and etiological factors that participate in the transportation of various drug delivery cargoes across the BBB/B_CSF and influence their therapeutic intracranial concentrations. Recent research works spanning various invasive, minimally invasive, and non-invasive brain- targeting approaches are discussed. While the pre-clinical outcomes from many of these approaches seem promising, further research is warranted to overcome the translational glitches that prevent their clinical use. Non-invasive approaches like intranasal administration, P-glycoprotein (P-gp) inhibition, pro-drugs, and carrier/targeted nanocarrier-aided delivery systems (alone or often in combination) hold positive clinical prospects for brain targeting if explored further in the right direction.