Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 14, Issue 5, 2007

The genetic complexity of cancer has posed a formidable challenge to devising successful therapeutic treatments. Tumor resistance to cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs and radiation which induce DNA damage has limited their effectiveness. Targeting the DNA damage response is a strategy for combating cancer. The prospect for success of chemotherapy treatment may be improved by the selective inactivation of a DNA repair Read More

Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) comprises 80% of acute adult leukaemias and the disease has mostly an unfavourable outcome. Diagnostic criteria rely primarily on morphological classification, while prognostic evaluation is determined by cytogenetic methods. Survival is highly variable and it is a matter of debate, whether alternative therapeutic approaches may improve the effectiveness of conventional cytotoxic drug treatme Read More

Synthetic peptides have been shown to be valuable tools for viral laboratory diagnosis and can provide uniform, chemically well-defined antigens for antibody analysis, reducing inter- and intra-assay variation. The main aim in the development of peptide-based diagnostic tests is to recognise specific antibodies induced by the whole viral proteins but using selected short fragments containing the most potent antigenic determin Read More

Hepatitis C virus (HCV)-host interaction, namely the host immune reaction against various viral proteins, determines viral persistency and the severity of liver damage. The strong lymphotropism of HCV has been proven to be responsible in part for its ability to evade the peripheral immune response and possibly the frequency of HCV-related autoimmunity. Various mechanisms were reported to be responsible for HCV persist Read More

Familial aggregation has been shown for type 1 diabetes (T1D) although the nature of the factors (environment and/or genetics) responsible remains unclear. Familial clustering of diabetic nephropathy as well as of increased cardiovascular morbidity and early mortality has also been observed. This review describes the nearly 20 years history of our investigation in parallel with contemporary literature. The story is pre Read More

About 2-5% of all pregnant women develop gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) during their pregnancies and the prevalence has increased considerably during the last decade. GDM is a heterogeneous disorder that is defined as carbohydrate intolerance with onset or first recognition during pregnancy. It is manifested when pancreatic beta cells are no longer able to compensate for the increased insulin resistance duri Read More

The intracellular messenger cyclic GMP (cGMP) represents the key signal in several transduction pathways throughout the animal world. In the heart cGMP signaling contributes to functional interaction of different cell types. Nitric oxide (NO) and natriuretic peptides (NPs), major autocrine-paracrine cardiovascular regulators, increment intracellular cGMP through guanylate cyclases (GCs). NO and NPs interact with two GC ty Read More

Aberrant signaling caused by mutations in the RAS-RAF-MEK-ERK pathway and its upstream activators critically contributes to human tumor development. Strategies, which aim at inhibiting hyperactive signaling molecules, appear conceptually straight forward, but their translation into clinical practice has been hampered by many setbacks. Understanding structure, function and regulation of this intracellular pathway as Read More