Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 15, Issue 18, 2015

SMILES notation based optimal descriptors as a universal tool for the QSAR analysis with further application in drug discovery and design is presented. The basis of this QSAR modeling is Monte Carlo method which has important advantages over other methods, like the possibility of analysis of a QSAR as a random event, is discussed. The advantages of SMILES notation based optimal descriptors in comparison to com Read More

Natural products have been an integral part of sustaining civilizations because of their medicinal properties. Past discoveries of bioactive natural products have relied on serendipity, and these compounds serve as inspiration for the generation of analogs with desired physicochemical properties. Bioactive natural products with therapeutic potential are abundantly available in nature and some of them are beyond explo Read More

Drug discovery is aimed at finding therapeutic agents for the treatment of many diverse diseases and infections. However, this is a very slow an expensive process, and for this reason, in silico approaches are needed to rationalize the search for new molecular entities with desired biological profiles. Models focused on quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) have constituted useful complementary tools in medicina Read More

Inhibition of non-structural protein 5B (NS5B) represents an attractive strategy for the therapeutic treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV). In this study, machine learning classifiers such as artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF) and decision tree (DT) analyses were used to classify 970 compounds based on their physicochemical properties, including quantum chemical descriptors, con Read More

The increasing use of Nanoparticles (NPs) in a wide range of applications has led to a rising concern on the possible toxicological effects that this use may have on human health and the environment. Since experimental toxicity evaluation for the different types of NPs already available, is often expensive and time consuming, several computational approaches are proposed for the risk assessment of NPs. In this work, we h Read More

The CORAL software (http://www.insilico.eu/coral) has been used to develop quantitative feature–property/activity relationships (QFPRs/QFARs) for the prediction of endpoints related to different categories of nanomaterials. In contrast to previous models built up by using CORAL from a representation of the molecular structure by using simplified molecular input-line entry system (SMILES), the current QFPR/QFARs are b Read More

Fullerene and its derivatives are currently one of the most intensively investigated species in the area of nanomedicine and nanochemistry. Various unique properties of fullerenes are responsible for their wide range applications in industry, biology and medicine. A large pool of functionalized C60 and C70 fullerenes is investigated theoretically at different levels of quantum-mechanical theory. The semiempirial PM6 method, de Read More

Supported transition metals on TiO2 surfaces have shown exceptional catalytic properties in many important process such as CO oxidation, selective propane oxidation, hydrogenation, water adsorption and other catalytic and photocatalytic oxidation reaction at low-temperature. Among the three polymorphs of TiO2, the anatase crystal is the more photoactive. The anatase (101) surface attracts more attention since it ha Read More

Evaluation of chemical and physical properties of nanomaterials is of critical importance in a broad variety of nanotechnology researches. There is an increasing interest in computational methods capable of predicting properties of new and modified nanomaterials in the absence of time-consuming and costly experimental studies. Quantitative Structure- Property Relationship (QSPR) approaches are progressive tools in m Read More

Metal oxide nanomaterials have exhibited excellent performance as nanomedicines in photodynamic therapy (PDT) for cancer and infection treatment. Their unique and tunable physicochemical properties advance them as promising alternatives in drug delivery, early diagnosis, imaging, and treatment against various tumors and infectious diseases. Moreover, the implementation of nanophototherapy in deep tissue sites i Read More

The problem in this work is the computational characterization of cyclodextrins, crown ethers and hyaluronan (HA) as hosts of inclusion complexes for nanosized drug delivery vehicles in pharmaceutical formulations. The difficulty is addressed through a computational study of some thermodynamic, geometric and topological properties of the hosts. The calculated properties of oligosaccharides of D-glucopyranoses al Read More

The knowledge on potential harmful effects of metallic nanomaterials lags behind their increased use in consumer products and therefore, the safety data on various nanomaterials applicable for risk assessment are urgently needed. In this study, 11 metal oxide nanoparticles (MeOx NPs) prepared using flame pyrolysis method were analyzed for their toxicity against human alveolar epithelial cells A549, human epithelial col Read More

Nanoparticles are likely to interact in real-case application scenarios with mixtures of proteins and biomolecules that will absorb onto their surface forming the so-called protein corona. Information related to the composition of the protein corona and net cell association was collected from literature for a library of surface-modified gold and silver nanoparticles. For each protein in the corona, sequence information was extra Read More