Jordan University of Science and Technology

About: Jordan University of Science and Technology is a education organization based out in Irbid, Irbid, Jordan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 7582 authors who have published 13166 publications receiving 298158 citations. The organization is also known as: JUST.

Considerations in the sterile manufacture of polymeric microneedle arrays.

Abstract: We describe, for the first time, considerations in the sterile manufacture of polymeric microneedle arrays. Microneedles (MN) made from dissolving polymeric matrices and loaded with the model drugs ovalbumin (OVA) and ibuprofen sodium and hydrogel-forming MN composed of “super-swelling” polymers and their corresponding lyophilised wafer drug reservoirs loaded with OVA and ibuprofen sodium were prepared aseptically or sterilised using commonly employed sterilisation techniques. Moist and dry heat sterilisation, understandably, damaged all devices, leaving aseptic production and gamma sterilisation as the only viable options. No measureable bioburden was detected in any of the prepared devices, and endotoxin levels were always below the US Food & Drug Administration limits (20 endotoxin units/device). Hydrogel-forming MN were unaffected by gamma irradiation (25 kGy) in terms of their physical properties or capabilities in delivering OVA and ibuprofen sodium across excised neonatal porcine skin in vitro. However, OVA content in dissolving MN (down from approximately 101.1 % recovery to approximately 58.3 % recovery) and lyophilised wafer-type drug reservoirs (down from approximately 99.7 % recovery to approximately 60.1 % recovery) was significantly reduced by gamma irradiation, while the skin permeation profile of ibuprofen sodium from gamma-irradiated dissolving MN was markedly different from their non-irradiated counterparts. It is clear that MN poses a very low risk to human health when used appropriately, as evidenced here by low endotoxin levels and absence of microbial contamination. However, if guarantees of absolute sterility of MN products are ultimately required by regulatory authorities, it will be necessary to investigate the effect of lower gamma doses on dissolving MN loaded with active pharmaceutical ingredients and lyophilised wafers loaded with biomolecules in order to avoid the expense and inconvenience of aseptic processing.

Long-term clinical effect of adjunctive antimicrobial photodynamic therapy in periodontal treatment: a randomized clinical trial

Abstract: Mechanical removal of microbial biofilm dental plaque from tooth surfaces is important for treatment of periodontal diseases. However, the effectiveness of conventional scaling and root planing (SRP) is affected by the local conditions and residual bacteria which may affect the healing process. We performed a randomized clinical trial to test our hypothesis that adjunctive antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT) plus SRP has significant effect compared with SRP alone, which can last for 1 year. The study included 136 sites in 16 patients with previously untreated chronic periodontitis, at least one premolar and one molar in every quadrant (minimum, four teeth/quadrant) and at least one tooth with attachment loss of ≥4 mm in every quadrant. In all patients, two randomly assigned quadrants were treated with SRP and the other two were treated with SRP + aPDT. The clinical parameters of probing pocket depth (PPD), bleeding on probing (BOP), and clinical attachment level (CAL) were evaluated at baseline and after 3, 6, and 12 months. There were no significant differences between the two groups at baseline. PPD and BOP showed significant reduction, and CAL showed significant gain from baseline for all three time points in both groups. In addition, there were significantly greater reduction and gain for SRP + aPDT than for SRP at all three time points. No adverse effects of aPDT were observed. These data demonstrate significant improvement in all evaluated clinical parameters for at least 1 year and suggest that aPDT as an adjunctive therapy to SRP represents a promising therapeutic concept for persistent periodontitis.

Temporal hemodynamic and histological progression in Sugen5416/hypoxia/normoxia-exposed pulmonary arterial hypertensive rats

Abstract: We have investigated the temporal relationship between the hemodynamic and histological/morphological progression in a rat model of pulmonary arterial hypertension that develops pulmonary arterial lesions morphologically indistinguishable from those in human pulmonary arterial hypertension. Adult male rats were injected with Sugen5416 and exposed to hypoxia for 3 wk followed by a return to normoxia for various additional weeks. At 1, 3, 5, 8, and 13 wk after the Sugen5416 injection, hemodynamic and histological examinations were performed. Right ventricular systolic pressure reached its maximum 5 wk after Sugen5416 injection and plateaued thereafter. Cardiac index decreased at the 3∼5-wk time point, and tended to further decline at later time points. Reflecting these changes, calculated total pulmonary resistance showed a pattern of progressive worsening. Acute intravenous fasudil markedly reduced the elevated pressure and resistance at all time points tested. The percentage of severely occluded small pulmonary arteries showed a similar pattern of progression to that of right ventricular systolic pressure. These small vessels were occluded predominantly with nonplexiform-type neointimal formation except for the 13-wk time point. There was no severe occlusion in larger arteries until the 13-wk time point, when significant numbers of vessels were occluded with plexiform-type neointima. The Sugen5416/hypoxia/normoxia-exposed rat shows a pattern of chronic hemodynamic progression similar to that observed in pulmonary arterial hypertension patients. In addition to vasoconstriction, nonplexiform-type neointimal occlusion of small arteries appears to contribute significantly to the early phase of pulmonary arterial hypertension development, and plexiform-type larger vessel occlusion may play a role in the late deterioration.

Efficient Improvements on the BDND Filtering Algorithm for the Removal of High-Density Impulse Noise

Abstract: Switching median filters are known to outperform standard median filters in the removal of impulse noise due to their capability of filtering candidate noisy pixels and leaving other pixels intact. The boundary discriminative noise detection (BDND) is one powerful example in this class of filters. However, there are some issues related to the filtering step in the BDND algorithm that may degrade its performance. In this paper, we propose two modifications to the filtering step of the BDND algorithm to address these issues. Experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed modifications in producing sharper images than the BDND algorithm.