Current Drug Discovery Technologies - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2011

The key regular functions of microRNAs (miRNAs) were only discovered a few years ago, when it became evident that miRNAs play important roles in gene regulation. Today, more than 700 miRNAs have been identified from the human genome. Because of their regulatory functions in transcription, signal transduction, cell cycle regulation, proliferation, cell growth, apoptosis, cell metabolism and neurogenesis, malfuncti Read More

Significant efforts through genomic approaches have been dedicated toward the identification of novel proteinprotein interactions as promising therapeutic targets for indications such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and neuropsychiatric disorders. Additionally, the number of biotherapeutic agents entering the Pharmaceutical sector continues to increase and according to EvaluatePharma's “World Preview 201 Read More

Despite significant improvements in ways to treat cancer, numerous patients still die from this disease. One of the reasons for this inability to cure cancer is the lack of ability of drugs to penetrate target cells properly. While studies on drug resistance have focused on the molecular mechanisms of single cells, there has been little attention on drug penetration or distribution in solid tumor tissues. It is reported that the factors that Read More

Feature selection has become increasingly important for quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) studies. In the present article, we evaluate three state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms, namely mutual information (MI), genetic algorithm (GA), and support vector machine regression (SVR)-based recursive feature elimination (SVRRFE), in the reduction of high dimensional feature space for QSAR regression. Read More

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) starts to replicate upon virus-cell fusion mediated by the CD4-Envcoreceptor interaction. HIV enters target cells also through endocytosis, a mechanism which rarely leads to HIV replication. Both modes of entry are greatly improved by cell-cell contact. We recently reported that the contact of human primary dendritic cells with HIV-1 infected cells leads to high levels of virus endocytosis Read More

Obesity has been associated with both the carcinogenesis and poor prognosis of colon cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer-related death. Increased blood levels of insulin in obese subjects have been demonstrated to play a key role in carcinogenesis. It is also possible that insulin affects treatment efficacy, leading to poor prognosis. In this study, we demonstrated that insulin can increase HT29 colon cancer cell line resist Read More

The aim of this study was to develop a pH-sensitive chitosan/polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) based controlled drug release system for repaglinide. The hydrogels were synthesised by crosslinking chitosan and PVP blend with glutaraldehyde to form a semi-interpenetrating polymer network (semi-IPN). These semi-IPNs were studied for their content uniformity, swelling index (SI), mucoadhesion, wettability, in vitro release and their Read More

Dutasteride loaded liposomal system were developed for topical application in order to avoid the side effects associated with the oral administration of the drug. Drug-loaded multilamellar liposomes were prepared using thin-film hydration method followed by sonication and optimized with respect to entrapment efficiency, drug payload, size and lamellarity. The vesicular systems consisting of egg phosphatidyl Read More

Nifedipine is a dihydropyridine calcium channel antagonist effective in the clinical management of cardiovascular disease. Due to nifedipine's poor water solubility and erratic bioavailability, complexation with selected cyclodextrins was studied in order to overcome these limitations. The aim was to develop a quantitative structure property relationship (QSPR) to identify cyclodextrin molecular properties important in complex f Read More