Most traditional vaccines are composed either of a whole pathogen or its parts; these vaccines, however, are not always effective and can even be harmful. As such, additional agents known as adjuvants are necessary to increase vaccine safety and efficacy. This review summarizes the potential of biodegradable materials, including synthetic and natural polymers, for vaccine delivery. These materials are highly biocompatible and have minimal toxicity, and most biomaterial-based vaccines delivering antigens or adjuvants have been shown to improve immune response, compared to formulations consisting of the antigen alone. Therefore, these materials can be applied in modern vaccine development.

Drug delivery to the brain remains challenging mainly due to the blood-brain barrier (BBB) that regulates the entrance of substances to the brain. Advances in nanotechnology have enabled the engineering of nanomedicines for biomedical applications including enhanced drug delivery into the brain. In this review, we describe strategies of nanomedicines engineered to traverse the BBB and deliver therapeutic molecules to target brain sites. We highlight the representative applications with materials including polymers, lipids, and inorganic elements for brain drug delivery. We finalize this review with the current challenges and future perspective of nanotherapeutics for advanced drug delivery to the brain.

The demand for improved technologies capable of rapidly detecting pathogens with high sensitivity and selectivity in complex environments continues to be a significant challenge that helps drive the development of new analytical techniques. Surface-based detection platforms are particularly attractive as multiple bioaffinity interactions between different targets and corresponding probe molecules can be monitored simultaneously in a single measurement. Furthermore, the possibilities for developing new signal transduction mechanisms alongside novel signal amplification strategies are much more varied. In this article, we describe some of the latest advances in the use of surface bioaffinity detection of pathogens. Three major sections will be discussed: (i) a brief overview on the choice of probe molecules such as antibodies, proteins and aptamers specific to pathogens and surface attachment chemistries to immobilize those probes onto various substrates, (ii) highlighting examples among the current generation of surface biosensors, and (iii) exploring emerging technologies that are highly promising and likely to form the basis of the next generation of pathogenic sensors.

A novel adsorbent was synthesized through the entrapment of ball-milled biochar in Ca-alginate beads for the removal of aqueous Cd(II). Batch adsorption experiments were conducted to compare Cd(II) adsorption characteristics of ball-milled biochar (BMB), Ca-alginate (CA), and Ca-alginate entrapped ball-milled biochar (CA-BMB). All the tested adsorbents showed excellent sorption ability. The maximum Cd(II) adsorption capacity estimated with Langmuir isotherm modeling was 251.8 mg g for CA, 227.1 mg g for CA-BMB, and 40.0 mg g for BMB. The results demonstrate that entrapment of ball-milled biochar in Ca-alginate provides a low-cost and high-effective way for the removal of aqueous Cd(II).