Infectious Disorders - Drug Targets (Formerly Current Drug Targets - Infectious Disorders) - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2011

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 2 billion people, or one-third of the world's population, are infected with M. tuberculosis. From this seedbed of latent infection, 9.4 million new cases of active disease and 1.3 million deaths were attributed to tuberculosis in 2008 [1]. Disease due to M. tuberculosis is most common in developing nations, both in absolute numbers and incidence of new cases. Twenty-two countri Read More

Since the identification of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) as the cause of the syndrome of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), there has been an evolution of compounds targeting the replication of the virus in an effort to delay clinical progression. In this review, we revise the mechanism of action of the different groups of drugs. We shortly revisit the older and perhaps lesser used as well as the more recen Read More

Introduction: HIV-1 infection is a major problem for children in lower income countries. The benefit of early antiretroviral (ARV) therapy started within 12 weeks of life is well documented. Although the development of new drug classes give alternative options for highly treatment experienced patients there is inadequate pharmacokinetic knowledge regarding the already established ARV classes in infants and children. Also, the Read More

Antiretroviral therapy (ART) scale-up in resource limited settings (RLS) has been successful, utilizing a standardized population-based approach to ART delivery. An unintended consequence of treatment scale-up is the inevitable emergence of HIV drug resistance (HIV DR) in populations even when patient adherence to ART is optimally supported. HIV DR has the potential to undermine the dramatic gains that ART has had in re Read More

The global impact of the HIV epidemic on the prevention and management of tuberculosis has resulted in added levels of complexity for physicians and other health- care workers caring for these patients. In addition to the usual difficulties associated with drug toxicities and regimen adherence, the concomitant treatment of HIV and tuberculosis is complicated by drug interactions between antiretroviral agents and the antituberc Read More

Childhood tuberculosis (TB) continues to be a neglected disease in areas where limited resources restrict the focus of national TB control programmes to only the most infectious sputum smear-positive cases. However, appreciation that children contribute a significant proportion to the global TB disease burden and suffer severe TB-related morbidity and mortality is growing. The World Health Organization (WHO) publish Read More

Drug development continues to be time consuming, expensive and less efficient, while drug therapy is often administered at suboptimal levels. This is particularly true with anti-infectives for HIV and tuberculosis. The application of pharmacometric principles and models to drug development and pharmacotherapy will improve the drug approval process and selection of optimal dosage regimens or therapeutic combinations. In this Read More

Poor adherence to combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) has been shown to be a major determinant of virologic failure, emergence of drug resistant virus, disease progression, hospitalizations, mortality, and health care costs. While high adherence levels can be achieved in both resource-rich and resource-limited settings following initiation of cART, long-term adherence remains a challenge regardless of available Read More

The progress of transcription is synthesized by complex molecules, among which DNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RNAP) is the central enzyme. The prokaryotic RNAP is a large protein composed of core subunits (α2,β and β') and a σ factor that is required for specific recognition of the promoter site and the initiation of transcription. Despite its ubiquity, structural and functional similarities, bacterial RNAPs do not share e Read More

Aims: Global figures clearly demonstrate inadequacy of current diabetes care: every 10 seconds one patient dies of diabetes-related pathologies. Nephropathy is the leading secondary complication of the disease. Nutritional supplement by chromium-picolinate is assumed to have beneficial therapeutic effects. However, potential toxic effects reported increase concerns about safety of chromium-picolinate. The experimental Read More

New drugs active against drug-resistant tuberculosis are urgently needed to extend the range of TB treatment options to cover drug resistant infections. Quinoxaline derivatives show very interesting biological properties (antibacterial, antiviral, anticancer, antifungal, antihelmintic, insecticidal) and evaluation of their medicinal chemistry is still in progress. In this review we report the properties and the recent develo Read More