Curcumin is one of the principle bioactive compounds used in the ayurvedic medicine system that has the history of over 5000 years for human use. Curcumin an "Indian Gold" is used to treat simple ailments like the common cold to severe life threatening diseases like cancer, and HIV. Though its contribution is immense for the health protection and disease prevention, its clinical use is limited due to its susceptible nature to alkaline pH, high temperature, presence of oxygen and light. Hence it becomes extremely difficult to maintain its bioactivity during processing, storage and consumption. Recent advancements in the application of nanotechnology to curcumin offer an opportunity to enhance its stability, bioactivity and to overcome its pharmacokinetic mismatch. This in turn helps to bridge the gaps that exist between its bench top research data to its clinical findings. Among the various types of nano/micro delivery systems, lipid based delivery systems are well studied and are the best suited delivery systems to enhance the stability and pharmacokinetic profile of curcumin both for pharma and the food application. In the current review, effort will be made to recapitulate the work done in the past to use lipid based delivery systems (liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, and emulsions) to enhance the application of curcumin for health promotion and disease prevention. Further, future prospects for the utilization of these lipid-based delivery systems will be discussed in detail.

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Background: In recent years, ophthalmic in situ gels have gained wide importance for the sustained delivery of drugs into the eye by overcoming the demerits of conventional eye drops. Objectives: The present investigation was undertaken to formulate and evaluate Bimatoprost loaded thermosensitive ophthalmic in situ gels for providing prolonged drug release pattern with good patient acceptance. Methods: Bimatoprost thermosensitive ophthalmic in situ gels were prepared by the cold method using temperature dependent polymers, Poloxamer 188/poloxamer 407 in combination with HPMC K4M as viscosifier used in three different concentrations. The prepared in situ gels were evaluated for appearance, clarity, pH, gelling capacity, gelation temperature, drug content and drug release study. The optimized batch of the formulation was subjected to drug release kinetics, ex vivo drug permeation, sterility, isotonicity, in vitro ocular irritancy test and short-term stability studies for 3 months. Results: From the drug release study, it was found that formulation; BT-5 had the highest drug release with higuchi release kinetic mechanism. The formulation (BT-5) was found to be sterile and the HET-CAM test confirmed that there was no ocular irritation and the formulation was stable for a period of 3 months without any significant changes in the evaluation parameters. Conclusion: Bimatoprost thermosensitive ophthalmic in situ gels can be a better alternative approach to provide sustained delivery of the drug by reducing the frequent drug instillation for the treatment of glaucoma.

In this paper, we describe the design of a real time water balance monitoring system, suitable for large campuses. The battery operated sensor nodes consist of an ultra-sound level sensor, a 16-bit microcontroller and a sub-gigahertz radio to setup a hub and spoke system. Real time data from the sensors is pushed to a server on the cloud to log as well as perform analytics. Industrial design of the device allows flexible mounting on a variety of tanks. Experimental results from a trial deployment in a medium sized campus are shown to illustrate the usefulness of such a system towards better management of campus water resources.