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Ruthenium (Ru) with atomic number of 44 is one of the platinum group metals, the others being Rh, Pd, Os, Ir and Pt. In earth's crust, it is quite rare, found in parts per billion quantities, in ores containing some of the other platinum group metals. Ruthenium is silvery whitish, lustrous hard metal with a shiny surface. It has seven stable isotopes. Recently, coordination and organometallic chemistry of Ru has shown remarkable growth. In this chapter, we review the application of Ru in diverse fields along with its physical and chemical properties. In the applications part of Ru we have primarily focused on the biomedical applications. The biomedical applications are broadly divided into diagnostic and treatment aspects. Ru and their complexes are mainly used in determination of ferritin, calcitonin and cyclosporine and folate level in human body for diagnosis of diseases. Treatment aspects focuses on immunosuppressant, antimicrobial and anticancer activity.

In the past few decades, an emerging drug delivery system that came into light is transdermal drug delivery system. It has become the talk of the town in the field of drug delivery because of its better and easy accessibility. Though it is one of the attractive routes, transport of drug through the skin has remained a challenge. To overcome the challenge, vesicular system has been adopted so as to have better skin permeation of bioactive agents. Vesicular system like liposome has shown inefficiency to cross the layers of skin. Then transethosomes and nanoethosomes are employed for delivering drug into the deeper layer of skin. Nanoethosomes and transethosomes have same composition that is water, ethanol and phospholipid. Transethosome contains edge activator additionally. Due to the presence of ethanol and edge activator, it displayed enhanced skin permeation. Vesicular system gives a better patient compliance, being a non-invasive method of drug administration. In this chapter, we attempted to provide brief information about methods of preparation, characterization and pharmaceutical uses of nanoethosomes and transethosomes.

In the past few decades, a worldwide increase in the incidence of fungal infections has been observed as well as rise in the resistance of some species of fungi to different fungicidal used in medicinal practice. Besides, fungi are the one of the most neglected pathogens as demonstrated by the fact that the amphotericin B and other sold treatments are still used as gold standard as antifungal therapy. The majority of used antifungal treatments have various drawbacks in terms of toxicity, efficacy as well as cost and their frequent use has also led to the emergence of resistant strains. Hence, there is a great demand for developing an antifungal belonging to a wide range of structural classes, selectively acting on new targets with least side effects. Natural products, either as pure phytocompounds or as standardized plant extracts, provide unlimited opportunities for new drug lads because of their having normally matchless chemical diversity. Present chapter focused on the work done in the field of antifungal activities of various plant components and novel approaches which will be the future prospective for the new drug discoveries and providing better antifungal therapy.

Liver is one of the vital organ that performs many functions in the human body. Prominently it acts as a metabolizing organ for the body. This chapter elaborately describes hepatocytes along with their morphological features. In addition, it explains the structure of hepatocytes and different parts such as kupffer cells, hepatic stellate and hepatic sinusoids. Moreover present chapter elaborates the varieties of functions that hepatocytes perform such as filtration of blood, acting as a viral incubator, lipophagy and regulation of insulin and glucose. This chapter also explains hepatic injury that is caused by chronic consumption of alcohol along with the mechanism behind it.