Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2010

Active specific immunotherapy holds great potential in the search for new therapeutic approaches for patients with cancer. Much preclinical and clinical evidence has shown that the immune system can be polarized against malignant cells by several vaccination strategies. Exploiting a naturally occurring defense system, anticancer vaccination embodies an ideal non-toxic treatment for cancer that has been nourishing t Read More

The improved understanding of the biochemical nature of tumor antigens and the identification of cellular and molecular mechanisms leading to activation of innate and adaptive immune cells have been of paramount importance in the progress of tumor immunology. Studies on the intricate network of interactions between tumor and immune cells have revealed novel regulatory signals, including cell surface inhibitory recept Read More

In recent decades our understanding of immune cell activation and homeostasis has significantly expanded. Such progress helped to better define the cellular, molecular, and epigenetic networks involved in the immune response in the tumor microenvironment and renewed the enthusiasm towards the potential power of cancer immunotherapy. However, successful translation of novel mechanistic discoveries into effective i Read More

Metabolic immune restraints belong to a highly complex network of molecular mechanisms underlying the failure of naturally occurring and therapeutically induced immune responses against cancer. In the light of the disappointing results yielded so far with anticancer vaccines in the clinical setting, the dissection of the cascade of molecular events leading to tumor immune escape appears the most promising way to Read More

The success that vaccines have had in the fight with infectious diseases has not been mirrored in their use in the fight against cancer. The major differences are that cancer vaccines have been tested in the therapeutic rather than the prophylactic setting, and in older adults rather than in the pediatric population. Cancers, as well as current standard treatments, are highly immunosuppressive, which further compromises the su Read More

After twenty years of use in humans, customized idiotypic vaccination yet remains a non-approved, experimental therapeutic option for patients with lymphoma and myeloma. Potentially applicable to all B-cell malignancies whose cells express a clonal immunoglobulin or its epitopes on their surface, this treatment is designed to prevent disease recurrence or progression. Mostly used in follicular lymphoma patients so far, idio Read More

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder demonstrating a combination of positive symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations, negative symptoms such as apathy and lack of emotion, and cognitive dysfunctions. The etiology is still unknown although there are several hypotheses such as dopamine/glutamate hypothesis. Since chlorpromazine was found to be effective for the treatment of the patients with schizophrenia ov Read More

Schizophrenic patients exhibit debilitating impairments of intellectual function. Typical and atypical antipsychotic medications are largely ineffective at treating the cognitive deficits of schizophrenia (CDS), and efforts to discover compounds that treat these symptoms are ongoing. Considerable tobacco use in schizophrenic patients, genetic linkage, and receptor binding studies suggest the involvement of nicotinic acetylcholine re Read More

Agonists and positive allosteric modulators of the α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) are currently being developed for the treatment of cognitive disturbances in patients with schizophrenia or Alzheimer's disease. This review describes the neurobiological properties of the α7 nAChR and the cognitive effects of α7 nAChR activation, focusing on the translational aspects in the development of these drugs. The functional Read More

The dopaminergic and glutamatergic hypotheses dominate current drug discovery strategies. The dopamine hypothesis states that hyperactivity of the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway is associated with positive symptoms of the disease, whereas hypoactivity of the mesocortical dopaminergic pathway is associated with the negative and cognitive symptoms. Increasing evidence has also suggested that hypoactivity in the cortico Read More

Schizophrenia presents with positive/psychotic, negative and cognitive symptoms. Positive symptoms seems due to a dopamine mesolimbic overreactivity, while negative/cognitive symptoms may conversely be due to mesocortical hypo-dopaminergia. Traditional dopamine D2 receptor blocking antipsychotics (e.g. haloperidol) are effective against psychotic/positive symptoms, but less so against negative/cognitive sympt Read More

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a useful technique to quantify various target molecules in vivo such as neuroreceptors, transporters and amyloid plaques using various successful radioligands. The technique has been widely used for the drug development in recent years. There are several approaches such as microdosing, measurement of in vivo receptor occupancy, and biomarkers. As for microdosing, the biodistr Read More