Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 21, Issue 3, 2014

Autoinflammatory diseases area group of clinical conditions other than autoimmune diseases, characterized by recurrent inflammatory episodes. From apathogenetic point of view they are determined by a dys regulation of innate immunity, without involvement of specific immunity (auto reactive T cells and auto antibodies). Recently, the increased knowledge in the field of auto inflammation highlighted shared immune m Read More

Natural polycationic membrane-active peptides typically lack disulfide bonds and exhibit fusion, cellpenetrating, antimicrobial activities. They are mostly unordered in solution, but adopt a helical structure, when bound to phospholipid membranes. Structurally different are cardiotoxins (or cytotoxins, CTs) from cobra venom. They are fully β- structured molecules, characterized by the three-finger fold (TFF). Affinity of CTs to Read More

Carbohydrate arrays are used as high-throughput screening platforms to study the carbohydrate-mediated recognition events for glycobiology. The polysaccharide arrays are easy to fabricate by non-covalently or covalently immobilizing polysaccharides onto array surfaces because polysaccharides have hydrophobic interactions. Oligosaccharides must be derived and covalently or non-covalently immobilized onto arr Read More

Clinically significant antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century. Yet new antibiotics are currently being developed at a much slower pace than our growing need for such drugs. Instead of focusing on conventional therapeutics that target in vitro bacterial viability, an alternative therapy is to target virulence factors and biofilms. Such anti-virulence strategies have attracted more a Read More

The adenosine A2A receptor (A2AR) is highly concentrated in the striatum, and a therapeutic target for Parkinson’s disorder (PD) and Huntington’s disease. High affinity and selective radiolabeled A2AR antagonists can be important research and diagnostic tools for PD. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) can play an important role by measuring radiolabeled A2A antagonists non-invasively in the brain. However, till date Read More

The long-term usage of HIV-1 non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) eventually leads to rapid emergence of drug-resistant viruses and severe side effect. Therefore, it is imperative to seek the additional NNRTIs with potent and broad spectrum anti-mutant activities, and excellent pharmacokinetic profiles. The discovery of etravirine, rilpivirine and other successful examples has influenced the NNRTIs desi Read More

Alzheimer´s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder with no known cure and rapid rise in incidence. The predominant cognitive impairment is currently treated using cognitive enhancers like cholinesterase inhibitors. The two molecular hallmarks of AD are amyloid plaques created from an amyloid precursor protein and hyperphosphorylated tau protein that is deposited as neurofibrillary tangles inside neurons. A number of Read More

NADPH oxidases (NOX), catalyzing the reduction of molecular oxygen to form the superoxide radical anion (•O2 -) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), are involved in several pathological conditions, such as stroke, diabetes, atherosclerosis, but also in chronic neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or multiple sclerosis. GKT136901 is a novel NOX-1/4 inhibitor with potential application in the ar Read More

Background: Photodynamic therapy (PDT) has been successfully used to treat various solid tumors. However, some cancer types respond poorly to PDT, including urothelial carcinomas, nasopharyngeal carcinomas, and extrahepatic cholangiocarcinomas. The therapeutic recalcitrance is in part due to the use of photosensitizers with suboptimal optical/ photochemical properties and unfavorable pharmacokinetics. Objective: To ci Read More