We review recent determinations of the present day mass function (PDMF) and initial mass functions (IMF) in various components of the Galaxy, disk, spheroid, young and globular clusters and in conditions characteristic of early star formation. As a general feature, the IMF is found to depend weakly on the environment and to be well described by a power-law form for m & 1M⊙ and a lognormal form ...

The increasing number of publications on the subject shows that nanomedicine is an attractive field for investigations aiming to considerably improve anticancer chemotherapy. Based on selective tumor targeting while sparing healthy tissue, carrier-mediated drug delivery has been expected to provide significant benefits to patients. However, despite reduced systemic toxicity, most nanodrugs appr...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to evaluate the therapeutic potential of using plasmid-expressed RNA interference (RNAi) targeting urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) receptor (uPAR) and uPA to treat human glioma. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN In the present study, we have used plasmid-based RNAi to simultaneously down-regulate the expression of uPAR and uPA in SNB19 glioma cell lines and ...

PURPOSE Inhibitor of apoptosis proteins (IAP) promote cancer cell survival and confer resistance to therapy. We report on the ability of second mitochondria-derived activator of caspases mimetic, birinapant, which acts as antagonist to cIAP1 and cIAP2, to restore the sensitivity to apoptotic stimuli such as TNF-α in melanomas. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Seventeen melanoma cell lines, representing fi...

A critical step in the dissemination of ovarian cancer is the formation of multicellular spheroids from cells shed from the primary tumour. The objectives of this study were to apply bioengineered three-dimensional (3D) microenvironments for culturing ovarian cancer spheroids in vitro and simultaneously to build on a mathematical model describing the growth of multicellular spheroids in these b...

We propose a neural probe combined with a neuronal spheroid (neurospheroid) cultured on electrodes for deep brain stimulation. Since neurons of the spheroid extend their axons deep into the brain tissue, the neural probe can electrically stimulate deep brain area via the neurons without inserting an invasive probe. Here we first fabricated an electrode and then successfully placed a neurospheor...

This paper reports a microfluidic device composed of a reversibly-assembled microfluidic chamber chip and multi-microwell array chip. This device enabled perfusion culture of spheroid in a microarray format, and detailed post-culture analysis by collection of spheroids from the disassembled device. The device provides four advantages simultaneously; the uniform spheroid formation, growth analys...

The far infrared background is a sink for the hidden aspects of galaxy formation. At optical wavelengths, ellipticals and spheroids are old, even at z ∼ 1. Neither the luminous formation phase nor their early evolution is seen in the visible. We infer that ellipticals and, more generally, most spheroids must have formed in dust-shrouded starbursts. In this article, we show how separate tracking...

Cell spheroids have been studied as a biomimic medicine for tissue healing using cell sources. Rapid spheroid production increases survival and activity well the efficiency of mass by reducing processing time. In this study, two-dimensional MXene (Ti3C2) particles were used to form mesenchymal stem spheroids, optimal concentration, spheroid-production times, bioactivity levels cells during proc...