Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 24, Issue 42, 2017

Cancer is a multifactorial disease and its genesis and progression are extremely complex. The biggest problem in the anticancer drug development is acquiring of multidrug resistance and relapse. Classical chemotherapeutics directly target the DNA of the cell, while the contemporary anticancer drugs involve molecular-targeted therapy such as targeting the proteins possessing abnormal expression inside the cancer cells. Conven Read More

Cancer is considered as one of the world's leading causes of morbidity and mortality. Over the past four decades, spectacular advances in molecular and cellular biology have led to major breakthroughs in the field of cancer research. However, the design and development of anticancer drugs prove to be an intricate, expensive, and time-consuming process. To overcome these limitations and manage large amounts of e Read More

This review addresses in-depth recent structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies published in 2015 on new marine compounds and their synthetic analogues with potential or established anticancer activity. Priority was given to papers on in vitro screening methods of marine-derived bioactive compounds, usually performed using panels of human cancer cell lines, as a first step of the anticancer drugs discovery process. Our re Read More

Intrinsic or acquired chemoresistance represents the main obstacle to the successful treatment of cancer patients. Several mechanisms are involved in multidrug resistance: decreased uptake of hydrophilic drugs, increase of energy dependent efflux, alteration of the redox state, alteration of apoptotic pathways, and modification of the tumor microenvironment. In recent years, several types of nanoparticles have Read More

Proteases are involved in a variety of processes associated with tumor development and progression. Because of their integral role in extracellular matrix and basal lamina degradation they play important roles in cancer cell migration, invasion, angiogenesis and metastasis. They are also involved in cancer cell signaling, the epithelial-mesenchymal transition, the antitumor immune response, cell de-differentiation and canc Read More

Protein kinases are versatile molecule switches that govern functional processes in signal transduction networks and regulate fundamental biological processes of cell cycle and organism development. The continuous growth of biological information and a remarkable breath of structural, genetic, and pharmacological studies on protein kinase genes have significantly advanced our knowledge of the kinase activa Read More

Nucleic acids are prone to structural polymorphism and a number of structures may be formed in addition to the well-known DNA double helix. Among these is a family of nucleic acid four-stranded structures known as G-quadruplexes (G4). These quadruplex structures can be formed by sequences containing repetitive guanine-rich tracks and the analysis of Non-B-DNA database indicated an enrichment of these sequence Read More

Background: Cancer chemotherapy is limited by severe side effects due to unspecific cytotoxic activity of currently used therapeutics. In order to minimize these unwanted effects, several approaches have been taken, relying on the use of light to activate drugs. As light can be delivered with a very high spatiotemporal resolution, this technique is a promising strategy to selectively activate cytotoxic drugs at their site of action a Read More