Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 16, Issue 30, 2016

There has been considerable interest in azole-containing compounds as promising antiinflammatory agents. Designed compounds with five-membered nitrogen-containing nuclei have demonstrated good anti-inflammatory activity, indicating their potential for the treatment of this highly irritating condition. Pyrazoles, have attracted much more attention than other azoles, however, reports on other azoles demonstrated th Read More

Oxazole derivatives are found to have a variety of biological activities. A large number of studies have revealed their outstanding anticancer activities. Here we review four different types of oxazole derivatives with anticancer potential reported over the last ten years. We focus our discussion on their activity, selectivity in different cancer cell lines, mechanisms of action, and their structural evolution.

Imidazo[1,2-a]pyridine has been shown to be an important biologically active moiety. This review is a compilation of the scattered output of results of the anticancer activities of the imidazo[1,2-a]pyridine system since 2001, which have been classified as inhibition of CDK, VEGFR, PI3K, EGFR, RGGT etc. along with inhibition against different tumor cell lines. Various imidazo[1,2-a]pyridine based analogues have been used as lead Read More

The 1,3-azole motif is a common and integral feature of many clinical drugs. Due to their wide-ranging applications, the development of 1,3-azoles as therapeutic agents is an ongoing focus of medicinal chemists. This review highlights the recent approaches towards the assembly of 1,3-oxazole, 1,3-thiazole and 1,3-imidazole motifs.

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are the leading factors of drug attrition in drug development and post-market drug withdrawal. The identification of potential ADRs can help prevent the failure of drug discovery and improve development efficiency. Furthermore, elucidating possible ADRs for known drugs can help better understand the mechanism of drug actions and even find new indications of old drugs. Unfortunately, only Read More

Using existing drugs for new indications (drug repurposing) is an effective method not only to reduce drug development time and costs but also to develop treatments for new disease including those that are rare. In order to discover novel indications, potential target identification is a necessary step. One widely used method to identify potential targets is through molecule docking. It requires no prior information excep Read More

Low drug productivity has been a significant problem of the pharmaceutical industry for several decades even though numerous novel technologies were introduced during this period. Currently pharmacologic dogma, “single drug, single target, single disease”, is at the root of the lack of drug productivity. From a systems biology viewpoint, network pharmacology has been proposed to complement the established guiding phar Read More

Small compounds constitute most of the available medicines. However, their stereophysical and stereochemical properties are relatively simple, which typically results in promiscuity in their interactions with human proteins. Such promiscuity has caused problems in our past efforts to discover and develop new drugs, but at the same time, it also brought us new opportunities to exploit the off-target interactions between small c Read More

The assessment of drug toxicity, especially hepatotoxicity, is a critical task in drug development process. To assist with early detection, various in silico approaches have been demonstrated to identify drugs with high hepatotoxicity potential. In this study, based on detailed review on previous reports on drug-induced cholestatic liver injury, we developed a network-based approach to predict cholestatic potential of chemicals us Read More

The scaffold protein Axin plays important roles in multiple signaling pathways through mediating the formation of different signaling complexes. Axin is best known for its role as a negative regulator in Wnt/β-catenin pathway. Aberrant activation of the key components in Wnt/β-catenin pathway including Axin has been linked to a variety of human cancers. Drugs developed for this pathway are far from satisfying largely Read More