scholarly journals Experimental Strategies to Explore Drug Action and Resistance in Kinetoplastid Parasites

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 950
Author(s):  
Magali Van den Kerkhof ◽  
Yann Sterckx ◽  
Philippe Leprohon ◽  
Louis Maes ◽  
Guy Caljon
Keyword(s):  
Drug Target ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
Adequate Treatment ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Tropical Regions ◽  
New Chemical Entities ◽  
Causative Agents ◽  
Complementary Techniques ◽  
Experimental Strategies

Kinetoplastids are the causative agents of leishmaniasis, human African trypanosomiasis, and American trypanosomiasis. They are responsible for high mortality and morbidity in (sub)tropical regions. Adequate treatment options are limited and have several drawbacks, such as toxicity, need for parenteral administration, and occurrence of treatment failure and drug resistance. Therefore, there is an urgency for the development of new drugs. Phenotypic screening already allowed the identification of promising new chemical entities with anti-kinetoplastid activity potential, but knowledge on their mode-of-action (MoA) is lacking due to the generally applied whole-cell based approach. However, identification of the drug target is essential to steer further drug discovery and development. Multiple complementary techniques have indeed been used for MoA elucidation. In this review, the different ‘omics’ approaches employed to define the MoA or mode-of-resistance of current reference drugs and some new anti-kinetoplastid compounds are discussed.

scholarly journals THERAPY OF ENDOCRINE DISEASE: Medical treatment of primary aldosteronism

2019 ◽  
Vol 181 (4) ◽  
pp. R147-R153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lechner ◽  
Katharina Lechner ◽  
Daniel Heinrich ◽  
Christian Adolf ◽  
Finn Holler ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Primary Aldosteronism ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Specific Treatment ◽  
Adequate Treatment ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Drug Dosing ◽  
Unilateral Disease ◽  
Bilateral Adrenal Hyperplasia ◽  
Causal Approach

In patients with primary aldosteronism, specific treatment provides prognostic benefit over optimal antihypertensive therapy and is therefore crucial to reduce mortality and morbidity in this subgroup of patients with hypertension. Prognostic relevance has been shown for adrenalectomy in unilateral disease and for medical treatment with mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists in bilateral adrenal hyperplasia. Collectively, evidence points to the superiority of surgical treatment compared to medical treatment. The causal approach of removing the mineralocorticoid excess, as well as the often-accompanying glucocorticoid excess, might provide one biologically plausible explanation for the observation of slightly better outcomes with surgical therapy. However, in patients living with primary aldosteronism, medical treatment is often insufficient for three major reasons. First and foremost, no marker of sufficient aldosterone blockade has yet been established and therefore adequate treatment of the aldosterone excess is often dismissed as a treatment goal. Second, side effects often limit patient compliance. Third, as recommendations differ from other indications like heart failure, drug dosing is often inadequate. The aim of this review is first to provide an overview over medical treatment options and second to review potential markers for treatment surveillance in patients with primary aldosteronism.

scholarly journals Recent Advances in the Discovery of Novel Antiprotozoal Agents

Molecules ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (21) ◽  
pp. 3886 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee ◽  
Kim ◽  
Hayat ◽  
Shin
Keyword(s):  
Drug Resistance ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
Parasitic Diseases ◽  
Protozoan Parasites ◽  
Pharmacological Activities ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Tropical Regions ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
The World ◽  
Effective Medication

Parasitic diseases have serious health, social, and economic impacts, especially in the tropical regions of the world. Diseases caused by protozoan parasites are responsible for considerable mortality and morbidity, affecting more than 500 million people worldwide. Globally, the burden of protozoan diseases is increasing and is been exacerbated because of a lack of effective medication due to the drug resistance and toxicity of current antiprotozoal agents. These limitations have prompted many researchers to search for new drugs against protozoan parasites. In this review, we have compiled the latest information (2012–2017) on the structures and pharmacological activities of newly developed organic compounds against five major protozoan diseases, giardiasis, leishmaniasis, malaria, trichomoniasis, and trypanosomiasis, with the aim of showing recent advances in the discovery of new antiprotozoal drugs.

Orthopedic treatment of vertebral compression fractures in osteoporosis

2011 ◽  
Vol 152 (33) ◽  
pp. 1328-1336
Author(s):  
Péter Pál Varga ◽  
István Béla Bors ◽  
Áron Lazáry
Keyword(s):  
Vertebral Compression Fracture ◽  
Systemic Disease ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Compression Fracture ◽  
Vertebral Compression Fractures ◽  
Orthopedic Treatment ◽  
Adequate Treatment ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Compression Fractures ◽  
Spine Care

Vertebral compression fracture is the most common type of fractures in osteoporosis increasing the mortality and morbidity of the systemic disease. Adequate treatment of the vertebral compression fractures is always in the focus of the national and international spine meetings and one of the most innovative fields in the spine care is the surgical therapy of the osteoporotic spine. Here, the authors summarize the orthopedic treatment options for vertebral compression fractures based on a literature review

Are Carbonic Anhydrases Suitable Targets to Fight Protozoan Parasitic Diseases?

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (39) ◽  
pp. 5266-5278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katia D'Ambrosio ◽  
Claudiu T. Supuran ◽  
Giuseppina De Simone
Keyword(s):  
Drug Resistance ◽  
Animal Models ◽  
Carbonic Anhydrase ◽  
Drug Target ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Parasitic Diseases ◽  
Carbonic Anhydrases ◽  
Extensive Drug Resistance ◽  
Protozoan Infections

Protozoans belonging to Plasmodium, Leishmania and Trypanosoma genera provoke widespread parasitic diseases with few treatment options and many of the clinically used drugs experiencing an extensive drug resistance phenomenon. In the last several years, the metalloenzyme Carbonic Anhydrase (CA, EC 4.2.1.1) was cloned and characterized in the genome of these protozoa, with the aim to search for a new drug target for fighting malaria, leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. P. falciparum encodes for a CA (PfCA) belonging to a novel genetic family, the η-CA class, L. donovani chagasi for a β-CA (LdcCA), whereas T. cruzi genome contains an α-CA (TcCA). These three enzymes were characterized in detail and a number of in vitro potent and selective inhibitors belonging to the sulfonamide, thiol, dithiocarbamate and hydroxamate classes were discovered. Some of these inhibitors were also effective in cell cultures and animal models of protozoan infections, making them of considerable interest for the development of new antiprotozoan drugs with a novel mechanism of action.

Preterm Birth, Inflammation and Infection: New Alternative Strategies for their Prevention

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 354-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Víctor M. Muñoz-Pérez ◽  
Mario I. Ortiz ◽  
Raquel Cariño-Cortés ◽  
Eduardo Fernández-Martínez ◽  
Leticia Rocha-Zavaleta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Preterm Birth ◽  
Medicinal Plants ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Neonatal Outcomes ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Therapeutic Benefits ◽  
Gynecology And Obstetrics

Background:Worldwide, the progress in reducing neonatal mortality has been very slow. The rate of preterm birth has increased over the last 20 years in low-income and middle-income countries. Its association with increased mortality and morbidity is based on experimental studies and neonatal outcomes from countries with socioeconomic differences, which have considered implementing alternative healthcare strategies to prevent and reduce preterm births.Methods:Currently, there is no widely effective strategy to prevent preterm birth. Pharmacological therapies are directed at inhibiting myometrial contractions to prolong parturition. Some drugs, medicinal plants and microorganisms possess myorelaxant, anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties that have proved useful in preventing preterm birth associated with inflammation and infection.Results:This review focuses on the existing literature regarding the use of different drugs, medicinal plants, and microorganisms that show promising benefits for the prevention of preterm birth associated with inflammation and infection. New alternative strategies involving the use of PDE-4 inhibitors, medicinal plants and probiotics could have a great impact on improving prenatal and neonatal outcomes and give babies the best start in life, ensuring lifelong health benefits.Conclusion:Despite promising results from well-documented cases, only a small number of these alternative strategies have been studied in clinical trials. The development of new drugs and the use of medicinal plants and probiotics for the treatment and/or prevention of preterm birth is an area of growing interest due to their potential therapeutic benefits in the field of gynecology and obstetrics.

The Discovery and Development of Oxalamide and Pyrrole Small Molecule Inhibitors of gp120 and HIV Entry - A Review

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (18) ◽  
pp. 1650-1675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damoder Reddy Motati ◽  
Dilipkumar Uredi ◽  
E. Blake Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Small Molecule ◽  
Viral Entry ◽  
Biological Evaluation ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
Design Synthesis ◽  
Mortality And Morbidity ◽  
Glycoprotein Gp120 ◽  
Hiv Entry ◽  
Immunodeficiency Syndrome ◽  
Hiv 1

Human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) is the causative agent responsible for the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) pandemic. More than 60 million infections and 25 million deaths have occurred since AIDS was first identified in the early 1980s. Advances in available therapeutics, in particular combination antiretroviral therapy, have significantly improved the treatment of HIV infection and have facilitated the shift from high mortality and morbidity to that of a manageable chronic disease. Unfortunately, none of the currently available drugs are curative of HIV. To deal with the rapid emergence of drug resistance, off-target effects, and the overall difficulty of eradicating the virus, an urgent need exists to develop new drugs, especially against targets critically important for the HIV-1 life cycle. Viral entry, which involves the interaction of the surface envelope glycoprotein, gp120, with the cellular receptor, CD4, is the first step of HIV-1 infection. Gp120 has been validated as an attractive target for anti-HIV-1 drug design or novel HIV detection tools. Several small molecule gp120 antagonists are currently under investigation as potential entry inhibitors. Pyrrole, piperazine, triazole, pyrazolinone, oxalamide, and piperidine derivatives, among others, have been investigated as gp120 antagonist candidates. Herein, we discuss the current state of research with respect to the design, synthesis and biological evaluation of oxalamide derivatives and five-membered heterocycles, namely, the pyrrole-containing small molecule as inhibitors of gp120 and HIV entry.

A Drug Target Interaction Prediction Based on LINE-RF Learning

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (7) ◽  
pp. 750-757
Author(s):  
Jihong Wang ◽  
Yue Shi ◽  
Xiaodan Wang ◽  
Huiyou Chang
Keyword(s):  
Network Topology ◽  
Drug Target ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
Combination Method ◽  
Learning Methods ◽  
Network Representation ◽  
On Line ◽  
Clinical Experiments

Background: At present, using computer methods to predict drug-target interactions (DTIs) is a very important step in the discovery of new drugs and drug relocation processes. The potential DTIs identified by machine learning methods can provide guidance in biochemical or clinical experiments. Objective: The goal of this article is to combine the latest network representation learning methods for drug-target prediction research, improve model prediction capabilities, and promote new drug development. Methods: We use large-scale information network embedding (LINE) method to extract network topology features of drugs, targets, diseases, etc., integrate features obtained from heterogeneous networks, construct binary classification samples, and use random forest (RF) method to predict DTIs. Results: The experiments in this paper compare the common classifiers of RF, LR, and SVM, as well as the typical network representation learning methods of LINE, Node2Vec, and DeepWalk. It can be seen that the combined method LINE-RF achieves the best results, reaching an AUC of 0.9349 and an AUPR of 0.9016. Conclusion: The learning method based on LINE network can effectively learn drugs, targets, diseases and other hidden features from the network topology. The combination of features learned through multiple networks can enhance the expression ability. RF is an effective method of supervised learning. Therefore, the Line-RF combination method is a widely applicable method.

scholarly journals 4E Interacting Protein as a Potential Novel Drug Target for Nucleoside Analogues in Trypanosoma Brucei

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 826
Author(s):  
Dorien Mabille ◽  
Camila Cardoso Santos ◽  
Rik Hendrickx ◽  
Mathieu Claes ◽  
Peter Takac ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mode Of Action ◽  
Drug Target ◽  
Drug Targets ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Adenosine Kinase ◽  
Nucleoside Analogues ◽  
Purine Salvage ◽  
Interacting Protein ◽  
Novel Drug

Human African trypanosomiasis is a neglected parasitic disease for which the current treatment options are quite limited. Trypanosomes are not able to synthesize purines de novo and thus solely depend on purine salvage from the host environment. This characteristic makes players of the purine salvage pathway putative drug targets. The activity of known nucleoside analogues such as tubercidin and cordycepin led to the development of a series of C7-substituted nucleoside analogues. Here, we use RNA interference (RNAi) libraries to gain insight into the mode-of-action of these novel nucleoside analogues. Whole-genome RNAi screening revealed the involvement of adenosine kinase and 4E interacting protein into the mode-of-action of certain antitrypanosomal nucleoside analogues. Using RNAi lines and gene-deficient parasites, 4E interacting protein was found to be essential for parasite growth and infectivity in the vertebrate host. The essential nature of this gene product and involvement in the activity of certain nucleoside analogues indicates that it represents a potential novel drug target.

scholarly journals Predicting drug–target interactions Based on the Ensemble Models of Multiple Feature Pairs

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 6598
Author(s):  
Cheng Wang ◽  
Jun Zhang ◽  
Peng Chen ◽  
Bing Wang
Keyword(s):  
Drug Target ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Characteristic Curve ◽  
Prediction Method ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
Good Prediction ◽  
Ensemble Model ◽  
Test Set ◽  
Multiple Feature ◽  
Validation Set

Backgroud: The prediction of drug–target interactions (DTIs) is of great significance in drug development. It is time-consuming and expensive in traditional experimental methods. Machine learning can reduce the cost of prediction and is limited by the characteristics of imbalanced datasets and problems of essential feature selection. Methods: The prediction method based on the Ensemble model of Multiple Feature Pairs (Ensemble-MFP) is introduced. Firstly, three negative sets are generated according to the Euclidean distance of three feature pairs. Then, the negative samples of the validation set/test set are randomly selected from the union set of the three negative sets in the validation set/test set. At the same time, the ensemble model with weight is optimized and applied to the test set. Results: The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (area under ROC, AUC) in three out of four sub-datasets in gold standard datasets was more than 94.0% in the prediction of new drugs. The effectiveness of the proposed method is also shown with the comparison of state-of-the-art methods and demonstration of predicted drug–target pairs. Conclusion: The Ensemble-MFP can weigh the existing feature pairs and has a good prediction effect for general prediction on new drugs.

scholarly journals S. pseudintermedius and S. aureus lineages with transmission ability circulate as causative agents of infections in pets for years

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Ruiz-Ripa ◽  
Carmen Simón ◽  
Sara Ceballos ◽  
Carmelo Ortega ◽  
Myriam Zarazaga ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Treatment Options ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
Clinical History ◽  
Multidrug Resistant ◽  
Hospital Environment ◽  
Antimicrobial Resistance Profile ◽  
Causative Agents ◽  
Veterinary Hospital ◽  
Coagulase Positive Staphylococci

Abstract Background Staphylococcus pseudintermedius (SP) and Staphylococcus aureus (SA) are common colonizers of companion animals, but they are also considered opportunistic pathogens, causing diseases of diverse severity. This study focused on the identification and characterization of 33 coagulase-positive staphylococci isolated from diseased pets (28 dogs and five cats) during 2009–2011 in a veterinary hospital in Spain in order to stablish the circulating lineages and their antimicrobial resistance profile. Results Twenty-eight isolates were identified as SP and five as SA. Nine methicillin-resistant (MR) isolates (27%) carrying the mecA gene were detected (eight MRSP and one MRSA). The 55% of SP and SA isolates were multidrug-resistant (MDR). MRSP strains were typed as ST71-agrIII-SCCmecII/III-(PFGE) A (n=5), ST68-agrIV-SCCmecV-B1/B2 (n=2), and ST258-agrII-SCCmecIV-C (n=1). SP isolates showed resistance to the following antimicrobials [percentage of resistant isolates/resistance genes]: penicillin [82/blaZ], oxacillin [29/mecA] erythromycin/clindamycin [43/erm(B)], aminoglycosides [18–46/aacA-aphD, aphA3, aadE], tetracycline [71/tet(M), tet(K)], ciprofloxacin [29], chloramphenicol [29/catpC221], and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole [50/dfrG, dfrK]. The dfrK gene was revealed as part of the radC-integrated Tn559 in two SP isolates. Virulence genes detected among SP isolates were as follow [percentage of isolates]: siet [100], se-int [100], lukS/F-I [100], seccanine [7], and expB [7]. The single MRSA-mecA detected was typed as t011-ST398/CC398-agrI-SCCmecV and was MDR. The methicillin-susceptible SA isolates were typed as t045-ST5/CC5 (n=2), t10576-ST1660 (n=1), and t005-ST22/CC22 (n=1); the t005-ST22 feline isolate was PVL-positive and the two t045-ST45 isolates were ascribed to Immune Evasion Cluster (IEC) type F. Moreover, the t10576-ST1660 isolate, of potential equine origin, harbored the lukPQ and scneq genes. According to animal clinical history and data records, several strains seem to have been acquired from different sources of the hospital environment, while some SA strains appeared to have a human origin. Conclusions The frequent detection of MR and MDR isolates among clinical SP and SA strains with noticeable virulence traits is of veterinary concern, implying limited treatment options available. This is the first description of MRSA-ST398 and MRSP-ST68 in pets in Spain, as well the first report of the dfrK-carrying Tn559 in SP. This evidences that current transmissible lineages with mobilizable resistomes have been circulating as causative agents of infections among pets for years.

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