Infectious Disorders - Drug Targets (Formerly Current Drug Targets - Infectious Disorders) - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2012

As an Editor-in-Chief of the journal ‘Infectious Disorders - Drug Targets’, I am very pleased to announce that it is now an internationally well-recognized and competitive journal with an always growing audience in various areas of research, such as virology, bacteriology, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, biochemistry, molecular biology and genomics. By publishing both timely in-depth review articles (see special Read More

Conventional therapies for microbial infection including vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals principally target specific properties of the microbe, such as antigen expression, attachment proteins for host cell interaction and entry, and microbial enzymes involved in replication and assembly. The efficacy of such approaches to protect human populations from disease is limited by the ability of known microbial pathogens to mutate Read More

The tetraspanins constitute a conserved superfamily of four-span membrane proteins that are widely distributed in multi-cellular organisms. A characteristic property of tetraspanins is their ability to form lateral associations with one another and with other membrane proteins, giving rise to tetraspanin enriched microdomains (TEM) that are involved in the molecular organisation of many membrane-associated functions such Read More

A wide variety of viruses cause significant morbidity and mortality in humans. However, targeted antiviral therapies have been developed for only a subset of these viruses, with the majority of currently licensed antiviral drugs targeting viral entry, replication or exit steps during the viral life cycle. Due to increasing emergence of antiviral drug resistant viruses, the isolation of multiple viral subtypes, and toxicities of existing therapie Read More

Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) and Rabies Virus (RABV) are the prototypic members of the rhabdovirus family. These viruses have a particularly broad host range, and despite the availability of vaccines, RABV still causes more than 50,000 human deaths a year. Trafficking of the virion or viral particles is important at several stages of the replicative life cycle, including cellular entry, localization into the cytoplasmic inclusion bod Read More

Picornavirus infection is characterised by host cell shutoff, wherein host transcription and translation processes are severely impaired. Picornavirus proteins interact with host cell proteins, resulting in alterations in the host cell synthetic, signalling and secretory machinery, and facilitating transcription and translation of viral proteins to achieve increased virus replication and assembly. Among the many cellular pathways aff Read More

Improved understanding of the signals that direct the intracellular transport of endogenous mammalian proteins, as well as the means by which viral invaders hijack transport pathways during infection, has revealed a plethora of methods for enhancing drug and gene delivery. Multi-component delivery vectors with virus-like functionality are being developed to assemble with therapeutic DNA into structured nanoparti Read More

Tat is a viral protein secreted from HIV infected cells and extra cellular Tat is suspected to prevent destruction of HIV infected cells from cells of the cellular immunity. The effect of anti retroviral therapy (ART) on Tat secretion has never been investigated. In this study, we tested for antibody reactivity against Tat variants representative of the main HIV subtypes in HIV positive patients receiving ART with undetectable viral load Read More