Current Drug Targets - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2013

Stroke is the third most common cause of death in the industrialized countries and adequate primary and secondary prevention strategies are mandatory. In addition to lifestyle-changes and correction of cardiovascular risk factors, the mainstay of the atherothrombotic stroke prevention is represented by antiplatelet treatment. Although aspirin and thienopyridines have proved their efficacy in the prevention of arterial thro Read More

Blood coagulation under physiological conditions is activated by thrombin, which converts soluble plasma fibrinogen (FBG) into an insoluble clot. The structure of the enzymatically-generated clot is very characteristic being composed of thick fibrin fibers susceptible to the fibrinolytic degradation. However, in chronic degenerative diseases, such as atherosclerosis, diabetes mellitus, cancer, and neurological disorders, fibrin clots ar Read More

Cardiopulmonary arrest is one of the leading causes of death and disability, primarily occurring in the aged population. Numerous global cerebral ischemia animal models induce neuronal damage similar to cardiac arrest. These global cerebral ischemia models range from vessel occlusion to total cessation of cardiac function, both of which have allowed for the investigation of this multifaceted disease and detection of numero Read More

Brain damage resulting from cerebral ischemia remains a significant problem at all stages of life. In adults, ischemic stroke is the third leading cause of death and the leading cause of disability in the developed world. In term newborns, moderate to severe brain damage after hypoxia-ischemia (HI) occurs in 1-3 per 1000 live births. One of the most striking features of HI injury is that after initial recovery of cellular oxida Read More

In the last decades, emerging molecular targets for ischemic neuroprotection and regeneration have been postulated. This fact allowed that classical drugs with well established therapeutic applications might be used in cerebrovascular diseases as well as neurodegenerative diseases. Minocycline is a commonly used antibiotic of the tetracycline family (7-dimethylamino-6-dimethyl-6-deoxytetracycline) which reveals cyt Read More

Ischaemic stroke is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. While recombinant tissue plasminogen activator can be administered to produce thrombolysis and restore blood flow to the ischaemic brain, therapeutic benefit is only achieved in a fraction of the subset of patients eligible for fibrinolytic intervention. Neuroprotective therapies attempting to restrict the extent of brain injury following cereb Read More

Effective efforts to screen for agents that protect against the devastating effects of stroke have not produced viable results thus far. As a result this article reviews the possible role of ethanol as a neuroprotective agent in stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Previous studies have associated ethanol consumption with a decreased risk of ischemic stroke, suggesting a neuroprotective mechanism. The translation of this clinical k Read More

Ischemic stroke is one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. There is no effective treatment for ischemic stroke apart from thrombolytic therapy, which has a narrow therapeutic time window. Gene therapy has proven to be effective in experimental stroke, but it suffers from disadvantages that limit its clinical application, such as difficulty in intracranial delivering of therapeutic genes, low efficacy in trans Read More

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Because stroke is a multifactorial disease with a short therapeutic window many clinical stroke trials have failed and the only currently approved therapy is thrombolysis. MicroRNAs (miRNA) are endogenously expressed noncoding short single-stranded RNAs that play a role in the regulation of gene expression at the post-transcriptional level, via degradati Read More

The human ether-a-go-go-related gene (hERG) is a K+ channel protein mainly expressed in the heart and the nervous systems and its blockade by non-cardiovascular acting drugs resulted in tachycardia and sudden death. In this present review, we have focused the physicochemical properties responsible for the hERG blocking activity of structurally different compounds. The reported research works showed that the hydrophobi Read More

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by progressive loss of memory and cognitive impairment. Aggregation of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides is the crucial factor in the onset of AD. The toxic Aβ peptides Aβ40 and Aβ42 are produced from the Aβ precursor protein (APP), a transmembrane protein which is folded and modified in endoplasmic reticulum (ER). ER is the ma Read More

Vaccines play a vital role in the field of community medicine to combat against several diseases of human existence. Vaccines primarily trigger the acquired immune system to develop long-lasting immunity against pathogens. Conventional approaches for vaccine delivery lacks potential to target a particular antigen to develop acquired immunity by specific antibodies. Recent advancements in vaccine delivery showed that i Read More