Current Drug Targets - Volume 15, Issue 10, 2014

Efficient drug delivery systems are exceedingly important for novel drug discovery. The evidence-based personalized medicine (EBPM) promises to deliver the right drug at the right time to a right patient as it covers clinicallysignificant genetic predisposition and chronopharmacological aspects of nanotheranostics. Recently nanotechnology has provided clinically-significant information at the cellular, molecular, and genetic level Read More

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common glial cell-derived brain tumour, with one of the worst prognoses among all cancers. GBM cells are infiltrative and extremely resistant to radio- and chemotherapy, which inevitably leads to recurrence after surgical resection. These inherent GBM properties are the reasons that patient treatment has not seen major improvements in decades. Studies have consistently shown t Read More

The term Parkinson’s disease has been changed in ‘Parkinson's diseases’ to describe different clinical entities observed in several studies investigating the existence of PD subtypes. PD patients could be grouped based on clinical features. By considering only motor symptoms, we can classically distinguish two groups: “ the tremorigen-form” and “akinetic- rigidity-form” where resting tremor and akinesia/bradikynesia a Read More

Mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH2) is an isoenzyme of aldehyde dehydrogenases (ALDH), a group of enzymes that are responsible for clearance of aldehydes in the body. In animal myocardial or cerebral ischemia/ reperfusion (I/R) models, accumulation of toxic aldehydes, such as 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal and malondialdehyde, is thought to be an important mechanism for myocardial and cerebral I/R injury. Among the Read More

Neuro-hormonal regulation of cardiac function via cathecol-amines results in increased heart rate and contractility. A persistent adrenergic tone, however, is an insult to the heart, affecting its regular homeostasis, altering morphology and gene expression patterns, as well as inducing apoptosis of cardio-myocytes. At the same time as being the main oxygen consumers, mitochondria are also key to the energy producti Read More

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have attracted interest as biomarkers of cancer metastases but only recently has a reliable method of CTC detection been developed. CTCs can be thought of as a liquid biopsy from the blood, and they can be used in pathological and molecular assays. CTCs may ideally replace metastatic tissue biopsies in the prediction and monitoring of therapeutic responses and tumor recurrence. CTCs can be Read More

The peptidyl prolyl cis/trans isomerase Pin1, the human ortholog of yeast Ess1 specifically isomerizes peptide bindings of pSer/pThr-Pro residues in various proteins, and regulates the expression levels and functions of phosphorylated proteins. Activation of Pin1 is associated with pathology of a variety of diseases, such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, infectious diseases and so on. Therefore, regulatory compounds for Pin1 can b Read More

The receptor for the lipid mediator PAF (PAFR) is a G-protein coupled receptor expressed in several cell types. Besides PAF, a series of oxidized phospholipids can also bind to PAFR. Dying cells also express PAFR-ligands and, in both situations, scavenger receptors are involved as well. There is evidence that the scavenger receptor CD36 and PAFR associate in the macrophages membrane and signal in conjunction to induce a re Read More

Sodium potassium pump (Na+/K+ ATPase) is a transmembrane protein complex found in all higher eukaryotes acting as a key energy-consuming pump maintaining ionic and osmotic balance in cells. Recently recognized as an important transducer and/or integrator of various signals as well as a protein-protein interaction scaffold forming receptor complexes with signaling properties, the most prominent pharmacological role of Read More