Background: In 2011/2012, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

Here, we report on the synthesis and biological properties of a conjugate in which daunorubicin (Dau) as chemotherapeutic agent was attached through an oxime bond to gonadotropin-releasing hormone-III (GnRH-III) as targeting moiety. In vitro toxicity and the cytostatic effect of the conjugate on MCF-7 human breast and C26 murine colon cancer cell lines were determined, and the results were compared with those obtained for the free daunorubicin, as well as with the doxorubicin containing derivative. In vivo antitumor effect of daunorubicin-GnRH-III was studied on Balb/c female mice transplanted with C26 tumor. Our data indicate that the daunorubicin-GnRH-III conjugate had a lower toxic effect than the free daunorubicin and it was essentially nontoxic up to 15 mg (Dau content)/kg body weight. The treatment of the C26 tumor bearing mice with the conjugate led to tumor growth inhibition and longer survival time in comparison with the controls and with the administration of the free drug. When mice were treated twice with the conjugate (on days 4 and 7 after tumor transplantation), 46% tumor growth inhibition was obtained. In this case, the increase of the median survival time was 38% compared to the controls.

Some new glycosides of 3-ferrocenyl-1-(4'-hydroxyphenyl)-prop-2-en-1-one were prepared and transformed into the corresponding pyrazoline and pyrazole derivatives. Using methyl-hydrazine, formation of regioisomers was observed. DDQ was found to be a mild and efficient reagent for the pyrazoline-pyrazole dehydroaromatization process. The structure of the new compounds was proved by IR and NMR spectroscopy. The in vitro antitumor activity of the substances was investigated against human leukemia (HL-60) cells by the MTT method. Among these new compounds some chalcone derivatives (3 a, 3 b, 5 a, and 5 b) showed attractive in vitro antitumor effects on human leukemia cells. These molecules contained ferrocenyl moieties and a p-hydroxy-phenolic ring or a size-independent apolar substitution of that.

Smart cities offer services to their inhabitants which make everyday life easier beyond providing a feedback channel to the city administration. For instance, a live timetable service for public transportation or real-time traffic jam notification can increase the efficiency of travel planning substantially. Traditionally, the implementation of these smart city services require the deployment of some costly sensing and tracking infrastructure. As an alternative, the crowd of inhabitants can be involved in data collection via their mobile devices. This emerging paradigm is called mobile crowd-sensing or participatory sensing. In this paper, we present our generic framework built upon XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) for mobile participatory sensing based smart city applications. After giving a short description of this framework we show three use-case smart city application scenarios, namely a live transit feed service, a soccer intelligence agency service and a smart campus application, which are currently under development on top of our framework.