Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 20, Issue 9, 2013

Recently, genomics and proteomics have been utilized as advanced tools for investigation of cellular signaling pathways and molecular interactions, and elucidated promiscuous networks composed of numerous interactions among pathways. However, some of these interactions are considered to be simply contributing to background ‘noise’ and others are as ‘crosstalk’ biologically-relevant to cellular physiology, leading to syner Read More

Oxygen (O2) is a vital element. Shortage of O2 results in deranged metabolism and important changes in vascular tone with opposite effects on the systemic and pulmonary circulation. During hypoxemia, oxidative stress exposes the organism to a sort of accelerated senescence as well as to several acute untoward effects. Thus, hypoxemia should be promptly recognized and treated, hopefully by measures tailored to the pat Read More

Islet transplantation is an attractive strategy to treat severe diabetic conditions in patients suffering from autoimmune derived diabetes, and it has currently been considered a forefront research arena in diabetes. Major aim of islet transplantation is to achieve successful insulin independent disease free survival. The key challenges in transplanted islets are the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and associated oxida Read More

The Janus family kinases (JAKs), JAK1, JAK2, JAK3, and TYK2, are involved in cell growth, survival, development, and differentiation of a variety of cells, particularly immune cells and hematopoietic cells. They form a subgroup of the non-receptor protein tyrosine kinases. Activating mutations within each of the JAKs is associated with malignant transformations; the most common are mutations of JAK2 in polycythemia vera (PV) Read More

4-mer hyaluronan (HA) oligosaccharides stimulate pro-inflammatory effects in different cell types by interacting with both the toll-like receptor-4 (TLR-4) and -2 (TLR-2). This interaction induces the activation of the transforming growth factor activated kinase-1 (TAK-1) that activates the nuclear factor kappaB (NF-kB) either directly and/or through the activation of p38-mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38-MAPK). This in Read More

The stereoselective preparation of several molecules containing structural fragments of the tetrahydrofuran and spiroacetal type is described. Their degree of cytotoxicity and their interactions with tubulin have been investigated. It has been confirmed that the tetrahydrofuran derivatives are cytotoxic but, in contrast to previous reports, it has been found that the cytoxicity is not due to interactions with the microtubule net Read More

Angiogenesis plays an important role in a wide range of physiological processes. In this paper, we designed and synthesized a series of new analogs including 11 line-peptides and 9 cyclo-peptides by using a marine cyclopeptide (compound 21) which could stimulate angiogenesis on zebrafish in our previous studies as lead compound. The majority of compounds synthesized exhibited angiogenic effects when tested in vivo on zeb Read More

The light sources used in current photodynamic therapy are mainly lasers or light emitting diodes, which are not suitable to treat large-volume tumors and those located in the inner body. To overcome the limitation, we propose an in situ light source to activate the photosensitizer and kill the cancer cells directly. In the present work, we use luminol as light source and meso-tetraphenylporphyrin as the photosensitizer. Accordin Read More