Search for: All records

Abstract Most nanomedicines require efficient in vivo delivery to elicit meaningful diagnostic and therapeutic effects. However, en route to their intended tissues, systemically administered nanoparticles often encounter delivery barriers. To describe these barriers, the term “nanoparticle blood removal pathways” (NBRP) is proposed, which summarizes the interactions between nanoparticles and the body's various cell‐dependent and cell‐independent blood clearance mechanisms. Nanoparticle design and biological modulation strategies are reviewed to mitigate nanoparticle‐NBRP interactions. As these interactions affect nanoparticle delivery, the preclinical literature from 2011–2021 is studied, and the nanoparticle blood circulation and organ biodistribution data are analyzed. The findings reveal that nanoparticle surface chemistry affects the in vivo behavior more than other nanoparticle design parameters. Combinatory biological‐PEG surface modification improves the blood area under the curve by ≈418%, with a decrease in liver accumulation of up to 47%. A greater understanding of nanoparticle‐NBRP interactions and associated delivery trends will provide new nanoparticle design and biological modulation strategies for safer, more effective, and more efficient nanomedicines. 

Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems have been adopted to create comfortable, healthy and safe indoor environments. In the control loop, the technical feature of the human demand-oriented supply can help operate HVAC effectively. Among many technical options, real time monitoring based on feedback signals from end users has been frequently reported as a critical technology to confirm optimizing building performance. Recent studies have incorporated human thermal physiologysignals and thermal comfort/discomfort status as real-time feedback signals. A series of human subject experiments used to be conducted by primarily adopting subjective questionnaire surveys in a lab-setting study, which is limited in the application for reality. With the help of advanced technologies, physiological signals have been detected, measured and processed by using multiple technical formats, such as wearable sensors. Nevertheless, they mostly require physical contacts with the skin surface in spite of the small physical dimension and compatibility with other wearable accessories, such as goggles, and intelligent bracelets. Most recently, a low cost small infrared camera has been adopted for monitoring human facial images, which could detect the facial skin temperature and blood perfusion in a contactless way. Also, according to latest pilot studies, a conventional digital camera can generate infrared images with the help of new methods, such as the Euler video magnification technology. Human thermal comfort/discomfort poses can also be detected by video methods without contacting human bodies and be analyzed by the skeleton keypoints model. In this review, new sensing technologies were summarized, their cons and pros were discussed, and extended applications for the demand-oriented ventilation were also reviewed as potential development and applications.