Current Organic Chemistry - Volume 20, Issue 17, 2016

Bioorthogonal reactions have been widely used on live-cell labeling, animal tissue imaging, drug delivery, and biomaterials in the recent ten years. Tetrazine bioorthogonal chemistry is not only orthogonal with biological system, other click chemistry and traditional polymer chemistry, but also has superb kinetics, generates biocompatibility products, and proceeds under mild reaction condition. All these features enable tetrazin Read More

The recent progress on controlled-release drug delivery systems with cyclodextrins as functional groups and their applications in nanomedicine are reviewed. As one of the most famous supramolecular host candidates, cyclodextrins with small guest molecules are extensively employed in controlled-release drug delivery systems in nanomedicine fields. The host-guest interactions between cyclodextrins and the guest molec Read More

In the past few decades, there has been great interest in the monofunctionalization of inorganic nanoparticles using organic chemistry tool. However, the uncontrollability in the degree of nanoparticle functionalization and the number of functional groups on the nanoparticles restrict their applications. It is now realized that precisely controlling the composition of the nanoparticles (NPs) will be of great importance for Read More

Collagen, the most abundant structural protein in mammals, has drawn attention of the scientists in biomedical science to a large extent. Although collagen and collagenous materials are famous for the excellent biological properties (good bioactivity, biodegradability, biocompatibility and lower immunogenicity), they still always suffer from the limitation by the relatively weak mechanical property, chemical stability and resistanc Read More

With the development of nanotechnology, nano-biomaterials have shown good development prospects in gene therapy. Cationic lipids include a group of amphiphiles that exhibit positive charge which interacts with negatively charged DNA/RNA leading to the formation of complexes containing condensed gene materials. Cationic liposomes complexed with gene materials are promising non-viral carriers for gene ther Read More

Due to core-shell nanostructures, highly branched and star-shaped macromolecules with three dimensional structural symmetry, dendrimers have been widely used as non-viral vectors in gene delivery. However, the performance of dendrimer-based gene vectors is far from ideal, mainly because of the low transfection efficiency and serious cytotoxicity. Therefore, many researchers focused on how to improve the transfe Read More

The potential of metabolites to contribute to drug-drug interactions (DDIs) has not been well defined so far. However, metabolites of parent drug compounds can contribute to both side effects and DDIs. To address this unmet challenge, we introduce recent advances as well as our perspectives of the metabolites in DDIs in this review. Firstly, we review several typical examples of organic small molecule drug metabo Read More

In recent years, nanoparticles have held great promise for successful drug targeting and controlled drug release. Many nanoparticle applications have been used to maximize the enhanced effective accumulation and intracellular entry. Because of the physicochemical properties of particles determine their therapeutic efficiency, it is vital to understand the effects of key drug carrier properties such as size, shape and surface Read More