Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 6, Issue 9, 2000

Treatment of psoriasis is rapidly changing, and there have been dramatic additions such as topical vitamin D analogs and a topical retinoid to the therapeutic armamentarium in recent years. Even though drug therapy is often inadequate and serves only to abate the skin disorder, anthralin of the anthracenone antipsoriatics clears the rash totally. Of all antipsoriatic agents, anthralin has proven to be the most remarkably consis Read More

Natural (all trans-retinoic acid, RA) and synthetic retinoids exhibit potent anti-proliferative, normalization of differentiation and anti-inflammatory activities which appear to account for their therapeutic effects in acne, psoriasis, photoaging, precancerous lesions and established cancers. Although RA has shown considerable promise in dermatologic indications, certain side effects have restricted its use as a choice of agen Read More

Psoriasis is a heterogenous skin disease, characterized by epidermal hyperproliferation, abnormal keratinization and inflammation. The heterogeneity of the disease results probably from the interaction of multiple gene abnormalities with environmental factors.The new approaches to drug design have become refocused to the emerging understanding of the role of signaling pathways in health and disease. Protein t Read More

Purine nucleoside phosphorylase (PNP) is one of the enzymes comprising the purine salvage pathway, and is responsible for the catalysis of the reversible phosphorolytic cleavage of purine ribonucleosides and 2-deoxyribonucleosides. The pivotal role of PNP in T-cell proliferation has been demonstrated in patients with inherited PNP deficiency, where T-cell levels may be 1-3percent of normal. This observation helped establi Read More

Within the past decade it has been shown that psoriasis can be treated topically with analogs of vitamin-D3 . Impaired differentiation and increased proliferation of keratinocytes are key features in psoriatic lesions together with a local activation of T lymphocytes. Evidence has accumulated showing that analogs of vitamin D3 increase differentiation and inhibit proliferation of keratinocytes. Therefore, analogs of vitamin D3 h Read More