Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 21, Issue 22, 2014

The use of nanobiotechnology in the formulation of drug carriers has been gaining popularity in recent years. Peptide self-assembly technology is a particularly attractive option due to its simplicity and programmability. Selfassembling peptide amphiphiles are surfactant-like molecules that are capable of spontaneous organization into a variety of nanostructures. The structural and functional features of these nanostructures ca Read More

Hydrogel system, as one of the most important biomaterials, is widely studied because of its tremendous potential in regenerative medicine conferred by its wide range of malleable biochemical and physical characteristics, which include its biocompatibility with the elemental biomolecules in vital tissues, its high water retention capability and adjustable soft-tissue-like physicochemical properties. These properti Read More

Heart disease is one of the major global health issues. Despite rapid advances in cardiac tissue engineering, limited successful strategies have been achieved to cure cardiovascular diseases. This situation is mainly due to poor understanding of the mechanism of diverse heart diseases and unavailability of effective in vitro heart tissue models for cardiovascular drug screening. With the development of microengineering tech Read More

Metastasis is responsible for most deaths of cancer burdens. Given that metastatic cancer cells are generally very low in quantity but high in multiplicity, and able to migrate to diverse organs, the diagnosis and intervention of metastatic cancers face varieties of challenges. For example, the biomarker for early diagnosis, and detection of circulating tumor cells by way of epithelial cell adhesion molecule, are complicated b Read More

Metabolizing and eliminating toxic chemicals in the liver are key processes in the body’s defense system. Drug-metabolizing enzymes (DMEs) play central roles in such processes. The activity and expression of several key DMEs are changed in various liver diseases and thus lead to significantly altered drug disposition. This phenomenon severely affects the pharmacotherapy of clinical medications in terms of the safety and effic Read More

Microarray-based kinomics, which measure the enzymatic activity or the presence of intracellular protein kinases, are now regarded as alternative tools to conventional mass spectrometry-based kinomics for examining intracellular kinomics. Here, we reviewed the principal advantages, recent progress, and remaining problems of representative microarray- based kinomics, including substrate peptide and protein microarrays, a Read More

Despite the significant advances in cardiac surgery, heart valve replacement still faces a dilemma. While mechanical valves offer lifelong durability they also commit patients to anticoagulation treatment for the rest of their life. On the other hand, bioprosthetic valves have superior hemodynamic performance but durability of the bioprosthesis limits their use to the elderly, with early onset calcification being the prim Read More

Others and we have shown in several studies that the natural tetrahydropyrimidine ectoine protects mammalian cells and tissues against various stress factors including ischemia/reperfusion injury, UV-irradiation, and inflammation. Since little is known about the molecular mechanism of this protective effect, which was ascribed exclusively to an extracellular action of this small water-soluble molecule, we asked whether and h Read More