Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 21, Issue 11, 2014

Ranolazine has primarily been developed and so far approved as an antianginal drug. However, it also has potentially interesting and relevant antiarrhythmic properties. Its antiarrhythmic effects are mainly based on the blockade of sodium currents, in particular of the late sodium current. Experimental and clinical studies have revealed an antiarrhythmic effect of ranolazine in atrial fibrillation as chronic or “pill in the pocket Read More

Human congestive heart failure is accompanied by structural and electrical alterations leading to the development of an arrhythmogenic substrate. This substrate is associated with the “sudden cardiac death” due to ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation. Multiple studies link distinct transcription factors to the transcriptional regulation of genes related to the formation of an arrhythmogenic substrate. In addition to ca Read More

In the recent years, Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) was suggested to be associated with cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure but also with arrhythmias both in animal models as well as in the human heart. This article focuses on the role of CaMKII for excitation-contraction coupling but more explicitly it highlights major CaMKIIdependent proarrhythmogenic mechanisms including SR Ca2+ leak an Read More

The development of pharmacologic agents for the treatment of diseases is still challenging, especially in rare inherited arrhythmia syndromes like long and short QT syndrome, Brugada syndrome and catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia. The underling pathophysiologic mechanism of these inherited diseases is in most cases either a gain- or a loss-of-function due to mutations in ion channel genes. Althou Read More

In the face of an aging population and thereby an increasing number of patients suffering from heart rhythm diseases development of therapeutic agents is one of the major challenges in modern biomedical research. Antiarrhythmic drug discovery was mainly hindered by the limited knowledge of the molecular underpinnings of cardiac electrophysiology in health and disease. In recent years, the zebrafish has emerged as an eff Read More

In the search for novel antiarrhythmic strategies, the cardiac Na+/Ca2+ exchanger (NCX) seems to be a promising target. Recent insights into the role of NCX in proarrhythmia stem from transgenic murine models with knockout or overexpression of NCX. There are significant differences regarding cellular electrophysiology, excitation-contraction coupling and Ca2+ handling when comparing mice to higher mammal and m Read More

Dysregulation of receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) in cancer cells is extremely common. Overexpression of human epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR/HER) tyrosine kinase is correlated with tumor aetiology, progression and poor prognosis. Their activation is also observed frequently in human cancers. Therefore, RTKs have been identified as important therapeutic targets in oncology. Many therapeutic methods have be Read More

Estrogen aids in neo-vascularization of various tumors during hypoxic conditions, however the role of estrogen within the hypoxic environment of thyroid cancer is not known. In a series of experimentations, using human thyroid cancer cells, we observed that estrogen and hypoxia modulate the hypoxia inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) signaling which is abrogated by the anti-estrogen fulvestrant and the HIF-1 inhibitor YC-1 (3-(5’-hyd Read More

Apoptotic cell death has been reported in human oocytes and preimplantation embryos under in vivo and in vitro conditions. BCL-2 family proteins comprise both anti- and pro-apoptotic members, which are likely to play a key role in controlling oocyte and early embryo survival. However, very limited data are available on their expression kinetics during human early embryonic development. Using our DNA microarray data, we Read More