Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 12, Issue 31, 2006

Before a brief overview on the topics in the current issue, feel bound to thank all the Scientists who kindly agreed to participate in this venture with their original contributions to this special issue, and the time and effort they have put into these comprehensive and carefully done reviews surely make the issue original and attractive. We again wish to express our thanks to Professor Atta-ur-Rahman for the invitation and to the Be Read More

Protein NMR as a screening tool in drug discovery has become prominent within the past ten years. Advances in protein manipulation, whether by biological means (labeling) or physical means (NMR), have created a powerful method that is able to observe ligand-target interactions in solution.

Computational protein design emerges in recent years as a field that could make a substantial impact on the design of protein drugs. It still consists mainly of redesigning parts of a protein sequence for increasing the stability of a given 3-dimensional conformation of a protein, but has already been extended from redesigning core residues to redesigning in all other protein regions, as well as to the design of backbone conforma Read More

The review gives first an introduction into the basics of surface plasmon resonance technology. The physical principle is shortly discussed followed by a discussion of the experimental details to be considered when using this technology for biomolecular interaction analysis. Based on recent publications it is demonstrated that the technology has widespread applications in many fields of the drug discovery process. Protein/pro Read More

The analysis of enantiorecognition processes involves the detection of enantiomeric species as well as the study of chiral discrimination mechanisms. In both fields Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy plays a fundamental role, providing several tools, based on the use of suitable chiral auxiliaries, for observing distinct signals of enantiomers and for investigating the complexation phenomena involved in en Read More

Tuberculosis (TB) is a growing international health concern, since it is the leading infectious cause of death in the world today. In particular, the increasing prevalence of multidrug-resistant (MDR)-TB has greatly contributed to the increased difficulties in the control of TB. Because of the global health problems of TB, the increasing rate of MDR-TB and the high rate of a co-infection with HIV, the development of potent new Read More

The characterization of the corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) family of neuroendocrine regulatory peptides, the cloning and pharmacological characterization of two CRF receptor subtypes (CRF1 and CRF2), and the development of selective CRF receptor antagonists provided new insight to unravel the mechanisms of stress and the potential involvement of the CRF system in different pathophysiological conditions, includin Read More