Current Drug Metabolism - Volume 2, Issue 4, 2001

In the last decade, a lot of amino acid transporters were identified by molecular cloning and assigned to the classically characterized amino acid transport systems. Among them, ones which belong to the heterodimeric amino acid transporter family are unique because of their broad substrate selectivity and their pathological implications as well as their structural features. The heterodimeric amino acid transporter fa Read More

Anthracycline antibiotics are very effective neoplastic agents widely used clinically. However, because of their many adverse effects (e.g. cardiotoxicity, leukopenia and alopecia), their clinical use has been limited. In order to minimize their adverse effects in clinical cancer chemotherapy, anthracyclines must be selectively transported into tumor cells. If there are differences in transport characteristics betw Read More

Acquirement of drug resistance by tumor cells is a major chemotherapeutic problem. It is well known that typical multidrug resistance is caused by P-glycoprotein and multidrug resistance related protein (MRP1) which belong to the ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporter family. Ishikawa proposed that the ATP-dependent glutathione-S-conjugate export pump (GS-X pump) and phase III detoxification system are essential to Read More

Biochemical modulation, which is more effective with the use of antitumor agents, has recently played very important role in cancer chemotherapy. In this review, it was reported that some of the methylxanthine derivatives, e.g. caffeine, were useful for modulator and attempted to defined the relation between the effect of methylxanthine derivatives on the doxorubicin transport and antitumor activity. Caffeine and theobromine Read More

A number of studies have appeared recently on the underlying mechanisms of liposome-cell interactions under in vitro conditions, in which isolated cell populations or cell lines were used. However, our knowledge of how liposomes interact with cells and the parameters that influence this in vivo is limited. We will summarize and discuss the relevant studies on this matter in this article. In addition, researchers in this field have long Read More

There is a wide range of methods available for studying the transport of drugs across the blood-brain barrier (BBB) which is equipped with several systems to transport drugs as well as endogenous nutrients and waste products. The in vivo brain microdialysis technique, which allows direct sampling of the brain interstitial fluid (ISF), is a powerful means of characterizing influx and efflux transport across the BBB. In this paper Read More