Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 21, Issue 9, 2014

The term “cancer cell reprogramming” is used to define any kind of intervention aimed at transforming cancer cells into terminally differentiated cells. Using this approach, new technologies have been applied with different methods for a more systemic approach to cancer treatment. This review reports on advances of these technologies, including our personal contributions, mainly carried out on endocrine-related cancers Read More

Neuroendocrine prostate carcinoma (NE-PCa) is a heterogeneous disease. Due to a high prevalence of NE (neuroendocrine) differentiation in patients who receive prolonged androgen deprivation treatment, the real incidence of NE-PCa remains unknown. Similarly, the biological steps from prostate carcinoma (PCa) toward NE differentiation are far less than definitive and, consequently, there is a lack of evidence to sup Read More

Among the most common human cancers, often only breast and prostate cancers have advantage of hormone dependence. For a long time, this advantage permitted breast cancer to be efficaciously managed in the adjuvant and metastatic settings with low side effects by endocrine therapy. Unfortunately, soon or afterward hormone dependence is lost in most patients. In breast cancer, de novo or acquired hormone resistan Read More

Lung neuroendocrine tumors are neoplasms originating from bronchopulmonary neuroendocrine cells, usually Kulchitsky cells, loaded with argentaffin granules. They account for 20-25% of all primitive lung tumors, the most common being the small-cell undifferentiated carcinoma. They include different tumors, from tumors of low-grade malignancy, especially the typical carcinoids, with high survival rates after surgical t Read More

Neoplastic urothelium has the capacity to display enormous plasticity and divergent differentiation. Neuroendocrine tumors arise as a result of such capacity. Neuroendocrine tumors of the bladder represent a limited number of neoplasms characterized by neuroendocrine hormone secretion and a poor outcome. These tumors can be displayed as pure neuroendocrine neoplasms or more frequently as a neuroendocrine counterpa Read More

Observations on the role of ovarian hormones in breast cancer growth, as well as interest in contraception, stimulated research into the biology of estrogens. The identification of the classical receptors ERα and ERβ and the transmembrane receptor GPER and the resolution of the structure of the ligand bound to its receptor established the principal molecular mechanisms of estrogen action. The presence of estrogen-like comp Read More

Reprogramming technologies have been developed to revert somatic differentiated cells into pluripotent stem cells that can be differentiated into different lineages potentially useful in stem cell therapy. Reprogramming methods have been progressively refined to increase their efficiency, to obtain a cell population suitable for differentiation, and to eliminate viral plasmid which could be responsible for many unwanted side-eff Read More

Amyloid aggregation is linked to a large number of human disorders, from neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or spongiform encephalopathies to non-neuropathic localized diseases as type II diabetes and cataracts. Because the formation of insoluble inclusion bodies (IBs) during recombinant protein production in bacteria has been recently shown to share mechanistic features with amyloid self-assembly, b Read More

In the present work, QSAR model was derived by multiple linear regression method for the prediction of anticancer activity of 18β-glycyrrhetinic acid derivatives against the human breast cancer cell line MCF-7. The QSAR model for anti-proliferative activity against MCF-7 showed high correlation (r2=0.90 and rCV2=0.83) and indicated that chemical descriptors namely, dipole moment (debye), steric energy (kcal/mole), Read More