Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 12, Issue 26, 2005

In human solid cancer, the lymph node status is the most important prognostic indicator for the clinical outcome of patients. Follow-up data has shown that about 80% of metastasis follows an orderly pattern of progression via the lymphatic network while about 20% systemic metastasis occurs, bypassing the lymphatic system. Over the past few years, advances have been made in understanding the cellular and molecula Read More

Since the beginning of the 20th century, important medicinal progress has led medical doctors to think that the end of devastating epidemics has arrived. In 1930, the discovery of sulfamides and penicillin opened a wide area of applications able to fight against bacterial infections. However, almost all antibiotics were baffled by the great ability to adaptation of bacteria (1) and the emergence of new bacterial agents, discover Read More

This review is intended to give a short summary of the developments in the field of natural and synthetic alicyclic and heterocyclic hydroxylated β-amino acids and to focus on the main strategies that have been reported for their synthesis. Given the medicinal and biological significance of the hydroxylated β-amino acids, an increasing volume of research is currently being directed toward regio-, stereo- and enantioselective ac Read More

It was reported that angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) plays an important role in increasing blood pressure. Recently, it was reported that several food hydrolysates have ACE inhibitory effects in the spontaneous hypertensive rat (SHR) model and mildly hypertensive subjects. Therefore, the anti-hypertensive effects of brewer's yeast BY-G were investigated, which contains many kinds of beneficial nutrients (vitamins, mine Read More

Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein polymerase that maintains the length of telomeric DNA by adding hexameric units (TTAGGG) to the ends of the chromosomes. This mechanism prevents replicative senescence, thus conferring unlimited proliferative potential to cells. Telomerase reactivation has been detected in most human tumour tissue, indicating that the enzyme may be useful as a specific tumour marker. The inhibition o Read More

Quorum sensing (QS) systems comprise a new therapeutic target potentially substitutive or complementary to traditional antibiotic treatment of chronic diseases. One route to disrupt the previously established interrelationship between pathogenesis and QS is by blocking the dual functioning signal/receptor transcriptional regulator in some clinically relevant Gram-negative bacteria. The present review contains all reported co Read More

Platelet activation plays an important role in a wide range of pathological conditions. For example, platelet activation has been shown to be involved in the defence against parasitic infection, the pathogenesis of atherosclerotic disease, and various arterial and venous thrombotic diseases. Indeed, there is considerable interest in the manipulation of platelet function for therapeutic gain. It is for these reasons that there is considerab Read More

The phosphate group is at the heart of an enormous number of biological processes. The simple phosphorylation or dephosphorylation of a protein can have a wide range of consequences, including effects on its biological activity, its interaction with other proteins, and on its subcellular location. Abnormal levels of protein phosphorylation have been linked to a wide range of diseases including cancer and diabetes. Consequently, p Read More

The discovery of RNA interference (RNAi) in eukaryotic cells has been the major recent breakthrough in molecular and cell biology. RNAi machineries exert biological functions in gene regulation, genome defense and chromatin architecture and dynamics. The potential of RNAi to silence any gene of interest in a highly specific and efficient manner via double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) has literally revolutionized moder Read More

Due to an overlook on the part of the authors in Current Medicinal Chemistry, 2005, 12(7), 877-85 of article "2(3H)- Benzoxazolone and Bioisosters as 'Privileged Scaffold' in the Design of Pharmacological Probes" by Jacques Poupaert, Pascal Carato, Evelina Colacino and Saïd Yous. Two mistakes were unfortunately encountered: The affiliation of Dr Pascal Carato was not mentioned and the authorship of Prof. Saïd Yous had been lo Read More