Arab International University

Antibiotic resistance has accelerated into a critical global health emergency, undermining the effectiveness of modern medicine and increasing the burden of severe, persistent, and difficult-to-treat infections. This review synthesizes current evidence on the biological, clinical, and public health dimensions of resistance and highlights the major drivers behind its rapid expansion. Recent epidemiological data reveal substantial increases in mortality associated with resistant bloodstream, respiratory, and intra-abdominal infections, emphasizing the urgency of coordinated intervention. Mechanistic analyses demonstrate how horizontal gene transfer (HGT), mutational adaptation, biofilm formation, efflux systems, and enzymatic drug modification collectively strengthen bacterial survival. In parallel, persistent and tolerant cell populations further complicate therapeutic outcomes by enabling recurrent and chronic infections. Despite these challenges, several promising countermeasures have emerged. Advances in antimicrobial stewardship, drug repurposing, bacteriophage-based strategies, immunotherapies, and nanotechnology offer new avenues to restore or enhance antimicrobial efficacy. Innovative approaches—such as targeting novel metabolic pathways, disrupting virulence networks, and employing engineered phage systems—represent a growing frontier in drug development. Collectively, these insights highlight the importance of integrating molecular innovation, optimized clinical practices, and global surveillance as complementary strategies to mitigate the progression of antimicrobial resistance. Finally, this review acknowledges limitations related to the focus on bacterial pathogens, while recognizing that antifungal and antiviral resistance present parallel, distinct challenges in global health.

The poor solubility and permeability of Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS) Class IV drugs pose major challenges to achieving sufficient oral bioavailability and therapeutic efficacy. Improving drug dissolution is a key strategy to enhance bioavailability, which in turn can enable more effective targeting of drugs to their site of action. To address this, we formulated cefdinir, a model BCS Class IV compound, using three amorphisation strategies; solid dispersions, mesoporous silica dispersions, and co-amorphous systems to assess the impact of formulation on stability and dissolution. Formulations were prepared via spray drying and solvent immersion using different drug-to-polymer ratios, with miscibility predicted using Flory–Huggins theory. The amorphous nature of each system was confirmed using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), polarised light microscopy (PLM), and powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD). Dissolution studies revealed significantly enhanced drug release from all formulations compared to crystalline cefdinir. Among them, solid dispersion and co-amorphous systems exhibited the greatest improvement in dissolution rates, attributed to their ability to maintain supersaturation and inhibit crystallisation via kinetic stabilisation. These systems also showed better physical stability under non-sink aqueous conditions. However, mesoporous silica dispersions demonstrated superior long-term stability, retaining over 95% drug content and preserving their amorphous structure across three storage conditions (25 °C/0% RH, 40 °C/0% RH, and 40 °C/75% RH) for 6 months. This was attributed to the confinement of the drug within silica pores and the absence of hygroscopic excipients. Overall, this study highlights the distinct advantages of each approach, emphasising the importance of balancing dissolution enhancement with solid-state stability, and supports the use of theoretical modelling to guide rational formulation design for poorly soluble drugs to improve oral bioavailability and enable more targeted therapeutic outcomes.

Zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) were green-synthesized using aqueous leaf extract of Thymus vulgaris as a reducing and stabilizing agent. Comprehensive characterization using X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)- Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDX), and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) confirmed the formation of pure, hexagonal wurtzite ZnO NPs with an average crystallite size of 13.1 nm. The findings confirmed the formation of crystalline hexagonal ZnO with moderate colloidal stability. The average hydrodynamic diameter was 243.24 nm, attributed to particle agglomeration and phytochemical capping effects. Biologically, the ZnO NPs exhibited dose-dependent antibacterial activity against Gram-positive bacteria and significant cytotoxicity toward MCF-7 breast cancer cells (IC₅₀ = 34.36 μg/mL). Mechanistic investigations revealed enhanced intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation, Zn2+ ion release, and caspase-3 activation, indicating ROS-mediated apoptotic cell death. This study highlights the dual antibacterial and anticancer potential of T. vulgaris-mediated ZnO NPs and provides mechanistic insights into their bioactivity, supporting their promise as multifunctional green nanomaterials.

Infertility is a complex and multifactorial issue affecting numerous individuals worldwide. While numerous studies have explored the etiology of infertility, precise mechanisms underlying the condition remains elusive, particularly in specific population such as Syrian males. This comprehensive study aims to investigate the relationship between three key hormones, namely osteocalcin, leptin and testosterone and their potential impact on Syrian males with infertility. Osteocalcin is a bone-derived hormone that stimulates testosterone production in the testes. Leptin is an adipose-derived hormone that inhibits testosterone synthesis. Testosterone is the main androgen that supports spermatogenesis and male reproductive functions. The dysregulation of osteocalcin, leptin and testosterone has been associated with impaired spermatogenesis, decreased sperm motility, altered semen parameters and various other reproductive abnormalities. Furthermore, factors such as stress, malnutrition and exposure to toxins, may further disrupt the delicate hormonal balance, exacerbating infertility issues. Understanding the intricate relationship between osteocalcin, leptin and testosterone in the context of infertility is of paramount importance in developing strategies for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of male infertility.

This paper presents a comprehensive literature survey on image captioning, covering research published between 2018 and 2025. It introduces a novel taxonomy to classify existing approaches into nine major categories, including attention-based models, transformer-based architectures, reinforcement learning, and Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP). A total of 174 peer-reviewed studies are systematically reviewed, with comparative insights drawn across different model architectures, encoding strategies, and learning paradigms. The survey also explores major benchmark datasets such as MS COCO, Flickr30K, and Conceptual Captions, along with evaluation metrics like BLEU, CIDEr, METEOR, ROUGE, SPICE, CHAIR, CLIPScore, and BERTScore. In contrast to prior surveys, this work offers a detailed comparative analysis of state-of-the-art captioning models, highlighting their strengths, limitations, and real-world applicability. Recent models such as PaLI, OSCAR, BLIP-2, and OFA are critically examined in the context of caption quality, generalization, and multimodal alignment. A key research challenge identified across methods is the persistent problem of visual-semantic hallucination, which undermines factual alignment between image content and generated captions. This survey serves as a valuable resource for both newcomers and advanced researchers by offering a structured synthesis of recent developments, challenges, and future directions in the field of image captioning.