Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 25, Issue 34, 2018

Nanomedicine is a recent promising setting for the advancement of current medical therapies, in particular for cancer. Nanoparticle-mediated therapies are aimed to tackle extremely complex phenomena, involving different biochemical, mechanical and biophysical factors. Computational models can contribute to medical research by helping the understanding of biological mechanisms and by providing quantitative analyse Read More

Cancer treatment still remains a challenge due to the several limitations of currently used chemotherapeutics, such as their poor pharmacokinetics, unfavorable chemical properties, as well as inability to discriminate between healthy and diseased tissue. Nanotechnology offered potent tools to overcome these limitations. Drug encapsulation within a delivery system permitted i) to protect the payload from Read More

Background: The application of nanotechnology in the medical field is called nanomedicine. Nowadays, this new branch of science is a point of interest for many investigators due to the important advances in which we assisted in recent decades, in particular for cancer treatment. Cancer nanomedicine has been applied in different fields such as drug delivery, nanoformulation and nanoanalytical contrast reagents. Nanotec Read More

Background: Inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) including those derived from metals (e.g., gold, silver), semiconductors (e.g., quantum dots), carbon dots, carbon nanotubes, or oxides (e.g., iron oxide), have been deeply investigated recently for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in oncology. Compared to organic nanomaterials, inorganic NPs have several advantages and unique characteristics for better imaging and drug deli Read More

Nowadays, fast and sensitive methods for biomarkers detection exist, but the performance of most of them still rely centralized laboratory testing. The development of small, fast and simple to use medical devices that can help in making diagnosis accurate and with low-invasiveness is now a major challenge for nanotechnology. Nanomaterialsbased systems have significant advantages over current conventional approaches in Read More

Background: PET and SPECT imaging methods can be of excellent assistance for the development of new nanoparticle drug delivery systems, and at the same time, these investigations also offer the opportunity to produce exceptional new diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals, as well. With a multifunctional, nano-scaled drug delivery system, the diagnostic (imaging) methods and the therapy (delivering drugs or be Read More

Background and Rationale: Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) is the clinical practice of measuring pharmaceutical drug concentrations in patients' biofluids at designated intervals to allow a close and timely control of their dosage. This practice allows for rapid medical intervention in case of toxicity-related issues and/or adjustment of dosage to better fit the therapeutic demand. Currently, TDM is performed in centralized labo Read More

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), previously known only as a toxic agent, in the last decades has been recognized as an important endogenous gasotransmitter, playing a key role in the homeostasis of the cardiovascular system. In the last years, the growing evidence about a protective role exhibited by H2S against myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R), led to an increasing interest for the possible mechanism of action accou Read More

In acute myocardial infarction (AMI), the first line of treatment is to rapidly restore blood flow to the ischemic myocardium to limit infarct size. It is now well established that though clearly beneficial, the positive outcomes of this intervention are limited by injury in response to the reperfusion itself in addition to the prior ischemia. This process is described as reperfusion injury and is considered to contribute to the arrhythmias, Read More

Background: Excessive norepinephrine (NE) release in the ischemic heart elicits severe and often lethal arrhythmias. Resident cardiac mast cells synthesize and store active renin, which is released upon degranulation, causing the activation of a local cardiac renin-angiotensin system (RAS) responsible for NE release and consequent arrhythmias. Toxic aldehydes, known to be formed by lipid peroxidation in ischemia/reperfusi Read More

SIRT1 is a nicotinamide adenosine dinucleotide (NAD+)-dependent deacetylase, which removes acetyl groups from many target proteins, such as histone proteins, transcription factors and cofactors. SIRT1-catalyzed deacetylation of these factors modulates the activity of downstream proteins, thus influencing many biological processes. SIRT1 is involved in the regulation of metabolism, inflammation, and tumor growth. The acti Read More

Moderate exercise training is a key aspect of primary and secondary prevention strategies. Shear-induced upregulation of eNOS activity and function in the vascular endothelium is considered as one of the main molecular mechanisms of exercise-induced protection against myocardial ischemia/ reperfusion (I/R) injury. It has been reported that levels of plasma nitrite, which are largely dependent on eNOS activity, were i Read More