Advent of recombinant technology in protein synthesis has given birth to a new range of biopharmaceuticals. These therapeutic peptides and proteins are now emerging as an imperative part of various treatment protocols especially in the cancer therapeutics. Despite extensive research efforts, oral delivery of therapeutic peptide or protein is still a challenge for pharmaceutical industries and researchers. Number of factors including high proteolytic activity and low pH conditions of gastrointestinal tract act as major barriers in the successful delivery of intact protein/peptide to the targeted site. Low permeability of protein/peptide across the intestinal barrier is also a factor adding to the low bioavailability. Therefore, because of the short circulatory half-life exhibited by peptides in vivo, they need to be administered frequently resulting in increased cost of treatment and low patient compliance. Nano-carrier-based delivery presents an appropriate choice of drug carriers owing to their property to protect proteins from degradation by the low pH conditions in stomach or by the proteolytic enzymes in the gastrointestinal tract. This review focuses on recent aspects and patents on oral delivery of therapeutic proteins and peptides with special emphasis on nano-carrier-based approach.

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Nanotechnology is an upcoming technology that can provide solution for combating pollution by controlling shape and size of materials at the nanoscale. This review provides comprehensive information regarding the role of nanotechnology in pollution control at three different steps viz. Source reduction or pollution prevention, remediation or degradation of pollutants and sensing of pollutants. Due to its large surface area and high surface energy, the nanoparticles have the ability to absorb large amount of pollutants or catalyze reactions at a much faster rate, thus reducing energy consumption during degradation or helps in preventing release of contaminants. The nanosize of the particles also make it possible to reach otherwise inaccessible areas and hence promote in-situ remediation rather than ex-situ remediation. The ability of the nanoparticles to be coated with various ligands and control of surface area to volume ratio by changing the shape of the nanoparticles enables the design of sensors with high selectivity, sensitivity and specificity.

Forensic application of automatically matching skull with face images is an important research area linking biometrics with practical applications in forensics. It is an opportunity for biometrics and face recognition researchers to help the law enforcement and forensic experts in giving an identity to unidentified human skulls. It is an extremely challenging problem which is further exacerbated due to lack of any publicly available database related to this problem. This is the first research in this direction with a twofold contribution: (i) introducing the first of its kind skullface image pair database, IdentifyMe, and (ii) presenting a preliminary approach using the proposed semi-supervised formulation of transform learning. The experimental results and comparison with existing algorithms showcase the challenging nature of the problem. We assert that the availability of the database will inspire researchers to build sophisticated skull-to-face matching algorithms.