Mini Reviews in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 14, Issue 10, 2014

Concomitantly with the increasing prevalence of childhood obesity, the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) is rising among children and adolescents, leading to fears for future epidemics of type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease in the young. MetS includes central obesity, hypertension, low HDL cholesterol, high triglycerides, and elevated concentrations of fasting blood glucose. Nonalcoholic fatty li Read More

Radiation and genotoxic drugs are two of the cornerstones of current cancer treatment strategy. However, this type of therapy often suffers from radio- or chemo-resistance caused by DNA repair mechanisms. With the aim of increasing the efficacy of these treatments, there has been great interest in studying DNA damage responses (DDR). Among the plethora of signal and effector proteins involved in DDR, three related kin Read More

Ionizing radiation is the more effective therapy to reduce tumor growth through damaging the DNA of cells. In response to DNA damage, cells activate the checkpoint kinases such as CHK2, which signal to initiate repair processes and cell-cycle arrest, until the damaged DNA is repaired. At present, the development of CHK2 inhibitors has provided an interesting strategy for the treatment of cancer by introducing new radiati Read More

Influenza virus is an important RNA virus causing pandemics (Spanish Flu (1918), Asian Flu (1957), Hong Kong Flu (1968) and Swine Flu (2009)) over the last decades. Due to the spontaneous mutations of these viral proteins, currently available antiviral and anti-influenza drugs quickly develop resistance. To account this, only limited antiinfluenza drugs have been approved for the therapeutic use. These include amantadine and Read More

In the last ten years, a high amount of genetic assays has been developed for molecular biopathology and genetic laboratories of the hospitals, mainly developed and provided by external companies. In some cases, the specialized staff members of the hospitals (doctors, biopathologists, geneticists or pharmacists) develop their own methods. The validation of these methods is required before their use in clinical testing, in Read More

MicroRNAs are evolutionary conserved single stranded non-coding RNAs with immense ability to posttranscriptionally regulate gene expression via complementary base pairing with mRNAs of more than 50% protein encoding genes. They play diverse roles in physiological and pathophysiological processes such as normal development and cancer pathogenesis respectively. Recent investigations have focused on the identification a Read More

Progesterone, extensively used in human as well as veterinary medicines is a progestogen type of hormone. With the aim for hunting the stable polymorph, this review examines polymorphic behavior of progesterone and stabilization of less stable form by co-crystallization. An overview of two monotropically related forms of progesterone – form-I and form-II, synthetic enantiomer, ent-progesterone and racemic progestero Read More

Ion chromatography is a well-established regulatory method for analyzing anions and cations in environmental, food and many other samples. It offers an enormous range of possibilities for selecting stationary and mobile phases. Additionally, it usually helps to solve various separation problems, particularly when it is combined with different detection techniques. Ion chromatography can also be used to determine man Read More