Pinyon and juniper are invasive woody species in the western United States that occupy over 30 million hectares of land. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has embarked on harvesting these woody species to make room for range grasses for grazing. The major application of harvested pinyon–juniper (PJ) is low-value firewood. Thus, there is a need to develop new high value products from this woody biomass to reduce the cost of harvesting. We investigated the fractional catalytic pyrolysis of PJ using both HZSM-5 catalyst and red mud at 475 °C in a fluidized bed reactor at atmospheric pressure. Both the HZSM-5 and the red mud were effective catalysts for producing low-viscosity pyrolysis oils. Oils that were catalyzed with red mud had a lower viscosity (96 cP @40 °C) than oils that were catalyzed with HZSM-5 (213 cP @40 °C). In both cases, the yields of liquids ranged from 42 wt % to 49 wt %. The mechanisms of catalysis by the two catalysts were quite different. The HZSM-5 rejected oxygen mostly as carbon monoxide (CO) and produced lower amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2); in contrast, the red mud produced more CO2 and less CO. However, both catalysts produced similar amounts of water. The char/coke yields from both catalysts were similar but the total gas yields were slightly different. The higher heating value of the red mud catalyzed oil (HHV = 29.46 MJ/kg) was slightly higher than that catalyzed by HZSM-5 (HHV = 28.55 MJ/kg). Thus, red mud can be used to achieve similar catalytic pyrolysis results as HZSM-5 catalysts.

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Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common form of primary malignant bone cancer in adolescents. Over the years, OS prognosis has greatly improved due to adjuvant and neoadjuvant (preoperative) chemotherapeutic treatment, increasing the chances of successful surgery and reducing the need for limb amputation. However, chemotherapeutic treatment to treat OS is limited by off-target toxicities and requires improved localization at the tumor site. Collagen, the main constituent of bone tissue, is extensively degraded and remodeled in OS, leading to an increased availability of denatured (monomeric) collagen. Collagen hybridizing peptides (CHPs) comprise a class of peptides rationally designed to selectively bind to denatured collagen. In this work, we have conjugated CHPs as targeting moieties to water-soluble N-(2-hydroxypropyl)methacrylamide (HPMA) copolymers to target OS tumors. We demonstrated increased accumulation of collagen-targeted HPMA copolymer–CHP conjugates compared to nontargeted HPMA copolymers, as well as increased retention compared to both nontargeted copolymers and CHPs, in a murine intratibial OS tumor model. Furthermore, we used microcomputed tomography analysis to evaluate the bone microarchitecture and correlated bone morphometric parameters (porosity, bone volume, and surface area) with maximum accumulation (S max) and accumulation at 168 h postinjection (S 168) of the copolymers at the tumor. Our results provide the foundation for the use of HPMA copolymer–CHP conjugates as targeted drug delivery systems in OS tumors.