No abstract

Osmium (Os)-based photosensitizers (PSs) exhibit unique broad, red-shifted absorption, favoring PDT activity at greater tissue depths. We recently reported on a potent Os(II) PS, rac-[Os(phen)2(IP-4T)](Cl)2 (ML18J03) with submicromolar hypoxia activity. ML18J03 exhibits a low luminescence quantum yield of 9.8 × 10−5 in PBS, which limits its capacity for in vivo luminescence imaging. We recently showed that formulating ML18J03 into 10.2 nm DSPE-mPEG2000 micelles (Mic-ML18J03) increases its luminescence quantum yield by two orders of magnitude. Here, we demonstrate that Mic-ML18J03 exhibits 47-fold improved accumulative luminescence signals in orthotopic AT-84 head and neck tumors. We show, for the first time, that micellar formulation provides up to 11.7-fold tumor selectivity for ML18J03. Furthermore, Mic-ML18J03 does not experience the concentration-dependent quenching observed with unformulated ML18J03 in PBS, and formulation reduces spectral shifting of the emission maxima during PDT (variance = 6.5 and 27.3, respectively). The Mic-ML18J03 formulation also increases the production of reactive molecular species 2–3-fold. These findings demonstrate that micellar formulation is a versatile and effective approach to enable in vivo luminescence imaging options for an otherwise quenched, yet promising, PS.

It is well known that IP over WDM is a promising and simplified network architecture for future high speed networking, in which the IP layer can be used as the control plane to manage the optical layer, in addition to providing user's data transmission functionalities. Among others, key functions of the IP control plane are the provisioning of optical circuits for end-toend data transmission between routers and fault management. An open question is what protocols are most suitable for providing such functions. The paper describes a suite of protocols that was implemented to accomplish both optical circuit provisioning and fault management in an IP over WDM network. The protocols were implemented and tested using the Ω (Optical Mesh network for Emerging Gigabit Applications) test-bed.Experimental results indicate good scalability properties of the implemented protocols. For example, it is possible to handle more than a hundred wavelengths with restoration times that are below few tens of milliseconds.