Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 16, Issue 14, 2016

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a common and disabling disease and the third leading cause of global mortality behind ischemic heart disease and stroke. Acute exacerbations of COPD accelerate lung function decline affecting the quality of life of COPD patients and moreover, remain the major contributors to morbidity and mortality of these patients. Cardiovascular comorbidities are prevalent in COPD patients Read More

Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) pH is a commonly studied biomarker which represents the acidity of the whole airway tract, including the lower and upper airways as well as oral cavity. Because neat, unprocessed EBC pH can be affected by environmental and end-tidal carbon dioxide, two further reproducible techniques have been developed to measure condensate acidity with several methodological, pathophysiological a Read More

Difficult asthma is a heterogeneous disease of the airways including various types of bronchial inflammation and various degrees of airway remodeling. Therapeutic response of severe asthmatics can be predicted by the use of biomarkers of Type2-high or Type2-low inflammation. Based on sputum cell analysis, four inflammatory phenotypes have been described. As induced sputum is timeconsuming and expensive techni Read More

Pulmonary surfactant is a highly surface-active mixture of proteins and lipids that is synthesized and secreted in the alveoli by type II epithelial cells and is found in the fluid lining the alveolar surface. The protein part of surfactant constitutes two hydrophilic proteins (SP-A and SP-D) that regulate surfactant metabolism and have immunologic functions, and two hydrophobic proteins (SP-B and SP-C), which play a direct role in the or Read More

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airways disorder mainly characterized by heterogeneity. A phenotype is defined as a group of patients that present similar clinically observable characteristics, without establishing a direct etiologic relationship with a distinct pathophysiologic mechanism. An endotype, on the other hand, describes a subgroup that shares the same pathophysiologic processes that lead to the development, t Read More

Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) is a chronic, progressive, debilitating disease of unknown etiology and a median survival from diagnosis of 3-5 years. Despite extensive research efforts, its etiology in humans still remains largely unknown, and no curative drug therapies are available. With a gradually increasing worldwide incidence, IPF still presents a major challenge in clinical research due to its appreciable heterogeneity a Read More

Bronchial asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) remain a global health problem with significant morbidity and mortality. The changes in bronchial microvasculature that occurin asthma and COPD contribute to airway wall remodeling. Angiogenesis seems to be more prevalent in asthma and vasodilatation seemsmore relevant in COPD while vascular leak is present in both diseases. Recently, there has Read More

Breathomics, the multidimensional molecular analysis of exhaled breath, includes analysis of exhaled breath with gas-chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) and electronic noses (e-noses), and metabolomics of exhaled breath condensate (EBC), a non-invasive technique which provides information on the composition of airway lining fluid, generally by high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrosc Read More

Nitric oxide (NO), the first gas known to act as a biological messenger, is one of the most widely studied free radical/gas in medicine, both for its biological function and therapeutic applications. The measurement of endogenous NO in exhaled air is widely used in the evaluation of lung disorders. Partitioning of exhaled nitric oxide (eNO) is of increasing interest because of the additional information about lung pathology a Read More