Potential of curcumin and niacin-loaded targeted chitosan coated liposomes to activate autophagy in hepatocellular carcinoma cells: An in vitro evaluation in HePG2 cell line

Autophagy is a mechanism by which cellular material is delivered to lysosomes for degradation, leading to the basal turnover of cell components and providing energy and macromolecular precursors. Autophagy has opposing, context-dependent roles in cancer, and interventions to both stimulate and inhibit autophagy have been proposed as cancer therapies. This has led to the therapeutic targeting of autophagy in cancer to be sometimes viewed as controversial. In this Review, we suggest a way forwards for the effective targeting of autophagy by understanding the context-dependent roles of autophagy and by capitalizing on modern approaches to clinical trial design.

NAD(+) has emerged as a vital cofactor that can rewire metabolism, activate sirtuins, and maintain mitochondrial fitness through mechanisms such as the mitochondrial unfolded protein response. This improved understanding of NAD(+) metabolism revived interest in NAD(+)-boosting strategies to manage a wide spectrum of diseases, ranging from diabetes to cancer. In this review, we summarize how NAD(+) metabolism links energy status with adaptive cellular and organismal responses and how this knowledge can be therapeutically exploited.

Combined and carefully selected use of experimental techniques – understanding nanoparticle properties and optimizing performance in applications. Nanostructures have attracted huge interest as a rapidly growing class of materials for many applications. Several techniques have been used to characterize the size, crystal structure, elemental composition and a variety of other physical properties of nanoparticles. In several cases, there are physical properties that can be evaluated by more than one technique. Different strengths and limitations of each technique complicate the choice of the most suitable method, while often a combinatorial characterization approach is needed. In addition, given that the significance of nanoparticles in basic research and applications is constantly increasing, it is necessary that researchers from separate fields overcome the challenges in the reproducible and reliable characterization of nanomaterials, after their synthesis and further process ( e.g. annealing) stages. The principal objective of this review is to summarize the present knowledge on the use, advances, advantages and weaknesses of a large number of experimental techniques that are available for the characterization of nanoparticles. Different characterization techniques are classified according to the concept/group of the technique used, the information they can provide, or the materials that they are destined for. We describe the main characteristics of the techniques and their operation principles and we give various examples of their use, presenting them in a comparative mode, when possible, in relation to the property studied in each case.