Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2009

Drug bioavailability depends on several pharmacokinetic aspects such as passive diffusion and active transport through several physiological barriers, in particular membranes of the gastrointestinal tract and the blood brain barrier. These two barriers represent the first line of defense of the organism through which the passive and active transports as well as the metabolism modulate drug absorption and disposition. Seve Read More

Pharmacokinetic limitations affect drug bioavailability determining the loss or the reduction of the pharmacological effects. The Gastro Intestinal tract (GI) and the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) are the most important restrictive and selective physiological lines of defense of the organism. Although several parameters such as LogP, LogD and Ka have been extensively employed for determining drug bioavailability, the active transpor Read More

With the discovery of novel therapeutic targets within the central nervous system (CNS), there has been a significant effort to synthesize a multitude of drug molecules with increasing potency and selectivity. However, the impact of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) in limiting effective concentrations of drug candidate from reaching the brain parenchyma is often ignored, resulting in a lack of efficacy when administere Read More

In the area of lead optimization for potential CNS-active drugs in medicinal chemistry, there is a great need for experimental methodologies that can generate data relevant to estimates of free (unbound) drug exposure within the CNS. The methods chosen have to be efficient and have to measure a pharmacologically relevant entity. The lack of methods for generating such data is probably linked with the lack of successful Read More

Drug entry into cells was previously believed to be via diffusion through the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane, with the contribution to uptake by transporter proteins being of only marginal importance. Now, however, drug uptake is understood to be mainly transporter-mediated. This suggests that uptake transporters may be a major determinant of idiosyncratic drug response and a site at which drug-drug interactions occur. A Read More

This paper provides a mini-review of some recent approaches for the treatment of brain pathologies examining both medicinal chemistry and pharmaceutical technology contributions. Medicinal chemistry-based strategies are essentially aimed at the chemical modification of low molecular weight drugs in order to increase their lipophilicity or the design of appropriate prodrugs, although this review will focus primarily on the Read More

Multi-drug resistance (MDR) frequently contributes to the failure of chemotherapeutic treatments in cancer patients. Mechanisms underlying the development of MDR have been extensively studied and are considered multifactorial. Among them, the ATP-Binding Cassette (ABC) family of proteins plays a pivotal role. Processes of cellular distribution and subcellular localization of MDR-ABC proteins are not yet well explored Read More

This paper describes an overview of recent insights concerning some socially relevant neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's (AD), Parkinson's (PD), Huntington's (HD) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob's (CJD) diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and epilepsy. For each pathological state, the direct and/or indirect involvement of Pglycoprotein (P-gp) efflux transport is underlined. On this basis, P-gp still represents an i Read More

Drug resistance is a major drawback for cancer chemotherapy protocols and previous studies have demonstrated the overexpression of the P-glycoprotein (P-gp) as mechanism by which myeloma cells develop multidrug resistance (MDR). However, other molecules may apparently promote MDR in multiple myeloma (MM). They include both lung resistance-related protein (LRP) and p53 activation. The inhibition of P-gp in MM Read More

Full text available