Fusion is a key event for enveloped viruses, through which viral and cell membranes come into close contact. This event is mediated by viral fusion proteins, which are divided into three structural and functional classes. The severe acute respiratory...
Wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is an end-stage event in a complex pathogenesis of macular degeneration, involving the abnormal growth of blood vessels at the retinal pigment epithelium driven by vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)....
Bufalin (BFL) has excellent physiological activities such as defending tumors, improving cardiac function, and so on. However, due to its poor water-solubility and bioavailability, the clinical application of BFL remains limited. In order to improve...
Novel peptide dendrimer with Lys-2His repeating units was recently synthesized, studied by NMR (Molecules, 2019, 24, 2481) and tested as a nanocontainer for siRNA delivery (Int. J. Mol. Sci., 2020, 21, 3138). Histidine amino acid residues were insert...
Despite being a mainstay of clinical cancer treatment, chemotherapy is limited by its severe side effects and inherent or acquired drug resistance. Nanotechnology-based drug-delivery systems are widely expected to bring new hope for cancer therapy. T...
The alarming growth of antimicrobial resistance and recent viral pandemic events have enhanced the need for novel approaches through innovative agents that are mainly able to attach to the external layers of bacteria and viruses, causing permanent da...
Non-viral transfection reagents are continuously being developed in attempt to replace viral vectors. Among those non-viral vectors, dendrimers have gained increasing interest due to their unique molecular structure and multivalency. However, more im...
Antimicrobial drug resistance is a major human health threat. Among the many attempts to tackle this problem, the synthesis of antimicrobial compounds that mimic natural antimicrobial peptides appears as a promising approach. Peptide-based dendrimers...
Peptides displaying antimicrobial properties are being regarded as useful tools to evade and combat antimicrobial resistance, a major public health challenge. Here we have addressed dendrimers, attractive molecules in pharmaceutical innovation and de...
The development of new nanocontainers for hydrophobic drugs is one of the most important tasks of drug delivery. Dendrimers with hydrophobic interiors and soluble terminal groups have already been used as drug carriers. However, the most convenient c...
Introduction: Bacterial proliferation in health environments may lead to the development of specific pathologies, but can be highly dangerous under particular conditions, such as during chemotherapy. To limit the spread of infections, it is helpful t...
A series of new peptide dendrimers with amphiphilic surface, designed around a dendronized ornithine (Orn) core were synthesized and characterized by ESI-MS, 1H-, 13C- NMR, and CD spectrometry. An improved antimicrobial potency against S. aureus and...
New peptide dendrimer with Lys-2Arg repeating units was recently studied experimentally by NMR (RSC Advances, 2019, 9, 18018) and tested as gene carrier successfully (Int. J. Mol. Sci., 2020, 21, 3138). The unusual slowing down of the orientational m...
Polyethylene glycol (PEG) has been conjugated to many drugs or drug carriers to increase their solubility and circulating lifetime, and reduce toxicity. This has motivated many experimental studies to understand the effect of PEGylation on delivery e...
Multidrug resistance infections are the main cause of failure in the pro-regenerative cell-mediated therapy of burn wounds. The collagen-based matrices for delivery of cells could be potential substrates to support bacterial growth and subsequent lys...
Fullerenes are promising drug candidates, but they are virtually insoluble in water. Surface hydroxylation of fullerenes and their encapsulation in nanocarrier systems, such as dendrimers, can be used to increase their solubility. However, hydroxylat...
Gene therapy is a good alternative for determined congenital disorders; however, there are numerous limitations for gene delivery in vivo including targeted cellular uptake, intracellular trafficking, and transport through the nuclear membrane. Here,...
Prosthetic joint infections (PJIs) remain a major challenge in orthopedic surgery due to the increasing prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens and their ability to form biofilms on implant surfaces. Local delivery of non-traditional antimicr...
Novel antiviral nanotherapeutics, which may inactivate the virus and block it from entering host cells, represent an important challenge to face viral global health emergencies around the world. Using a combination of bioorthogonal copper-catalyzed 1...
There is an urgent need to develop new antibiotics against multidrug-resistant bacteria. Many antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are active against such bacteria and often act by destabilizing membranes, a mechanism that can also be used to permeabilize b...
As the technologies for peptide synthesis and development continue to mature, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are being widely studied as significant contributors in medicinal chemistry research. Furthermore, the advancement in the synthesis of dendrim...
Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) causes a highly contagious disease of cloven-hoofed animals whose control relies on efficient vaccination. We have reported that dendrimer peptide B2T, with two copies of FMDV B-cell epitope VP1 (136–154) lin...
Dendrimer peptides are promising vaccine candidates against the foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV). Several B-cell epitope (B2T) dendrimers, harboring a major FMDV antigenic B-cell site in VP1 protein, are covalently linked to heterotypic T-cell epi...
The rice hoja blanca virus (RHBV), transmitted by the planthopper insect Tagosodes orizicolus, is a disease that attacks rice and generates significant production losses in Colombia. Fedearroz 2000 and Colombia I commercial rice varieties, which have...
In this paper we study two lysine-based peptide dendrimers with Lys-His-Arg and Lys-Arg-His repeating units and terminal lysine groups. Combination of His and Arg properties in a dendrimer could be important for biomedical applications, especially fo...
Peptide dendrimers, due to their biocompatibility and low toxicity, are highly promising candidates as nanocarriers for drugs and genes. The development of this kind of delivery system requires reliable monitoring of their metabolic and biological pa...
Non-viral transfection vectors are commonly used for oligonucleotide (ON) delivery but face many challenges before reaching the desired compartments inside cells. With the support of additional compounds, it might be more feasible for a vector to end...
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most prevalent form of dementia. It affects more than 30 million people worldwide and costs over US$ 1.3 trillion annually. AD is characterized by the brain accumulation of amyloid β peptide in fibrillar str...
Dendrimeric and branched peptides are polypeptides formed by diverse types of scaffolds to give them different forms. Previously, we reported a cascade-type, Lys-scaffolded antimicrobial peptide dendrimer D4R tethered with four RLYR tetrapeptides. An...
Glioblastoma is the most aggressive and invasive form of central nervous system tumors due to the complexity of the intracellular mechanisms and molecular alterations involved in its progression. Unfortunately, current therapies are unable to stop it...
Nanoparticles are widely used as theranostic agents for the treatment of various pathologies, including cancer. Among all, dendrimers-based nanoparticles represent a valid approach for drugs delivery, thanks to their controllable size and surface pro...
A readily and rapidly accessible triazine dendrimer was manipulated in four steps with 23% overall yield to give a construct displaying four maleimide groups and DOTA. The maleimide groups of the dendrimer are sensitive to hydrolysis under basic cond...
Novel polyfunctional small amphiphilic peptide dendrimers characterized by incorporation of a new core compounds – tris-amino acids or tetrakis-amino alcohols that originated from a series of basic amino acids – were efficiently synthesized. These ne...
Supramolecular chemistry holds great potential for the design of versatile and safe carriers for therapeutic proteins and peptides. Nanocarriers can be designed to meet specific criteria for given application (exact drug, administration route, target...
The widespread application of cell penetrating agents to clinical therapeutics and imaging agents relies on the ability to prepare them on a large scale and to readily conjugate them to their cargos. Dendritic analogues of cell penetrating peptides,...
In this paper, we perform computer simulation of two lysine-based dendrimers with Lys-2Lys and Lys-2Gly repeating units. These dendrimers were recently studied experimentally by NMR (Sci. Reports, 2018, 8, 8916) and tested as carriers for gene delive...
Since the first polyethylene glycol (PEG)ylated protein was approved by the FDA in 1990, PEGylation has been successfully applied to develop drug delivery systems through experiments, but these experimental results are not always easy to interpret at...
An approach based on a dendrimer display of B- and T-cell epitopes relevant for antibody induction has been shown to be effective as a foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) vaccine. B2T dendrimers combining two copies of the major FMD virus (FMDV) type O B-ce...
Background: Exposure to ozone level and ultraviolet (UV) radiation is one of the major concerns in the context of public health. Numerous studies confirmed that abundant free radicals initiate undesired processes, e.g. carcinogenesis, cells degenerat...
(1) Background: Natural peptides supporting the innate immune system studied at the functional and mechanistic level are a rich source of innovative compounds for application in human therapy. Increasing evidence indicates that apart from antimicrobi...
Microbial infections are a major public health concern. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been demonstrated to be a plausible alternative to the current arsenal of drugs that has become inefficient due to multidrug resistance. Herein we describe a n...
Background: Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common malignant tumor of the central nervous system (CNS). Neuroblastoma (NB) is one of the most common cancers of childhood derived from the neural crest cells. The survival rate for patients with GBM and...
Background: Melanoma is one of the most common malignancies, posing a significant health threat to patients, particularly in advanced stages due to its high aggressiveness. Chemotherapy agents with biocompatibility and low susceptibility to induce re...
Dengue fever, a rapidly spreading mosquito-borne viral disease, poses a major global health issue, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. The absence of a universally effective vaccine against all four dengue virus serotypes necessitates c...
The amplification of the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensitivity for the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) detection was studied using Poly(amidoamine) (PAMAM) succinamic-acid dendrimers. The dendrimers were conjugated with the complementary annealed...
A series of novel glycol-clusters containing sulfonated N-acetyl-D-glucosamine (GlcNAc) have been synthesized using click chemistry. Three dendrimers with aromatic dendrons were synthesized using chlorination, azidation and click chemistries. The res...
Background: Due to resistance to conventional therapy, a blood–brain barrier that results in poor drug delivery, and a high potential for metastasis, glioblastoma (GBM) presents a great medical challenge. Since the repertoire of the possible th...
In this article, we used the numerical self-consistent field method of Scheutjens–Fleer to study the micellization of hybrid molecules consisting of one polylysine dendron with charged end groups and several linear hydrophobic tails attached to...
Recent studies have shown that the peptide [des-Cys11,Lys12,Lys13-(p-BthTX-I)2K] (p-Bth) is a p-BthTX-I analog that shows enhanced antimicrobial activity, stability and hemolytic activity, and is easy to obtain compared to the wild-type sequence. Thi...
Herpes Simplex virus (HSV) is associated with a variety of diseases such as genital herpes and numerous ocular diseases. At the global level, high prevalence of individuals who are seropositive for HSV, combined with its inconspicuous infection, rema...
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