Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 15, Issue 34, 2009

Currently there is no cure for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's diseases, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and many others, which cause long-term suffering and ultimately death of patients. These devastating neurodegenerative diseases affect the lives of many thousands of patients and their families. Basic research on neurodegenerative disorders has revealed a highly complex picture Read More

Kinases, which number > 500 in humans, are a class of enzymes that participate in an array of important functions within normal cellular physiology and during various pathological conditions. Due to the key role of kinases in the regulation of all aspects of cellular signaling and the well established contribution of kinase dysregulation to the etiology of many human pathologies, the development of kinase inhibitors has e Read More

Neurodegenerative disorders (NDs) such as Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy, Friedreich's ataxia, and others are multi-factorial illnesses, in which many pathways (still poorly understood) act serially and in parallel to give a determined pathologic phenotype. Thus, presently there are no effective cures for these diseases. Some phenotypic as Read More

REST/NRSF is a transcription factor that represses transcription of several neuronal genes by binding to a DNA regulatory motif known as Repressor Element 1/Neuron-restrictive silencer element (RE1/NRSE). In Huntington's Disease, an inherited degenerative disease affecting the brain, REST/NRSF enters pathologically into the nucleus of affected cells, leading to the activation of the RE1/NRSE sites and causing decreased Read More

The heterogeneity of symptoms and disease progression observed in synucleinopathies, of which Parkinson's disease (PD) is the most common representative, poses large problems for its treatment and for the discovery of novel therapeutics. The molecular basis for pathology is currently unclear, both in familial and in sporadic cases. While the therapeutic effects of L-DOPA and dopamine receptor agonists are still the gold Read More

RNA-mediated interference (RNAi) is a powerful tool for experimental manipulation of gene expression and is widely used to investigate gene function both in vitro and in vivo. RNAi refers to an evolutionarily conserved cellular mechanism for sequence-specific post-transcriptional gene silencing, in which double-stranded RNAs promote selective degradation of homologous cellular mRNAs. Because RNAi-based technique Read More