Particle engineering for the production of respirable dry powder formulations

Hyaluronan (HA) plays an important role in lung pathophysiology. For this reason it has attracted great attention both as active ingredient and as excipient in treating lung diseases by direct pulmonary HA administration. The aim was the production of highly respirable and flowable HA powders either as a potential carrier for drug delivery or for being delivered directly by inhalation. Engineered sodium hyaluronate powders were produced by spray-drying technique. All the spray-dried powders were characterised in terms of particle size distribution, drug content, morphology and in vitro respirability. HA was successfully formulated with salbutamol sulphate in combination with leucine and highlighted remarkable aerodynamic performance (emitted dose equal to 83 % and FPF % equal to 97.1%). Moreover, HA colloidal solutions were designed and they were spray-dried. In order to improve particle aerodynamic characteristics, different types of excipients were investigated. In particular, stearylamine (5% w/w) allowed to obtain the best performance throughout the experimental set. Finally, in vitro biocompatibility was carried out by MTT assay and High Content Analysis for selected dry powder formulations and starting materials. The assays demonstrated the same outcome by confirming the HA biocompatibility and by producing the same rank of toxicity for the surfactants. The general conclusion of the project is that formulation containing HA and stearyl alcohol represents the best performing formulation.

Efficient Multi-hop Broadcast Data Dissemination in IoT and Smart Cities

Internet of Things (IoT) can be defined as a “network of networks” composed by billions of uniquely identified physical Smart Objects (SO), organized in an Internet-like structure. Smart Objects can be items equipped with sensors, consumer devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, or wearable devices), and enterprise assets that are connected both to the Internet and to each others. The birth of the IoT, with its communications paradigms, can be considered as an enabling factor for the creation of the so-called Smart Cities. A Smart City uses Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to enhance quality, performance and interactivity of urban services, ranging from traffic management and pollution monitoring to government services and energy management. This thesis is focused on multi-hop data dissemination within IoT and Smart Cities scenarios. The proposed multi-hop techniques, mostly based on probabilistic forwarding, have been used for different purposes: from the improvement of the performance of unicast protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to the efficient data dissemination within Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs).