Antimicrobial drug resistance has emerged as a significant challenge in contemporary medicine due to the proliferation of numerous bacterial strains resistant to all existing antibiotics. Meanwhile, riboswitches have emerged as promising targets for...
This review is focused on antisense and functional nucleic acid used for completely rational drug design and drug target assessment, aiming to reduce the time and money spent and increase the successful rate of drug development. Nucleic acids have un...
Casein kinase II (CK2) is an ubiquitous and pleiotropic serine/threonine protein kinase able to phosphorylate hundreds of substrates. Being implicated in several human diseases, from neurodegeneration to cancer, the biological roles of CK2 have been...
Multi-drug resistance in human bacterial pathogens has become a significant challenge for global healthcare this century, mainly due to the widespread misuse of antibiotics worldwide. As a result, millions of people have been affected by multi-drug-r...
PROTACs employ the proteosome-mediated proteolysis via E3 ligase and recruit the natural protein degradation machinery to selectively degrade the cancerous proteins. Herein, we have designed and synthesized heterobifunctional small molecules that con...
Despite the surge in cannabis chemistry research and its biological and medical activity, only a few cannabis-based pharmaceutical-grade drugs have been developed and marketed to date. Not many of these drugs are Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-ap...
Antimicrobial resistance poses a major threat to global health as the number of efficient antimicrobials decreases and the number of resistant pathogens rises. Our research group has been actively involved in the design of novel antimicrobial drugs....
HIV/AIDS stands as a global burden, and vaginal microbicides constitute a promising strategy for topical pre-exposure prophylaxis. Preceding the development of a microbicide containing tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) and emtricitabine (FTC), in s...
Formulating pharmaceutical cocrystals as inhalable dosage forms represents a unique niche in effective management of respiratory infections. Favipiravir, a broad-spectrum antiviral drug with potential pharmacological activity against SARS-CoV-2, exhi...
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a prime cause of liver diseases such as hepatitis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. The current drugs clinically available are nucleot(s)ide analogues that inhibit viral reverse transcriptase activity. Most...
Life-threatening systemic fungal infections occur in immunocompromised patients at an alarming rate. Current antifungal therapies face challenges like drug resistance and patient toxicity, emphasizing the need for new treatments. Membrane-bound enzym...
Polypharmacy can result in drug–drug interactions, severe side-effects, drug–disease interactions, inappropriate medication use in the elderly, and escalating costs. This study aims to evaluate nursing home residents’ medication reg...
The development of novel therapeutics in neuro-oncology faces significant challenges, often marked by high costs and low success rates. Despite advances in molecular biology and genomics, targeted therapies have had limited impact on improving patien...
In this article we propose a systematic development method for rational drug design while reviewing paradigms in industry, emerging techniques and technologies in the field. Although the process of drug development today has been accelerated by emerg...
Cancer drug resistance is an enormous problem. It is responsible for most relapses in cancer patients following apparent remission after successful therapy. Understanding cancer relapse requires an understanding of the processes underlying cancer dru...
Small-molecule drugs are organic compounds affecting molecular pathways by targeting important proteins. These compounds have a low molecular weight, making them penetrate cells easily. Small-molecule drugs can be developed from leads derived from ra...
Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) modeling is an essential tool for rational drug development and treatment design [...]
Despite numerous efforts, the therapeutic advancement for neuroblastoma and other cancer treatments is still ongoing due to multiple challenges, such as the increasing prevalence of cancers and therapy resistance development in tumors. To overcome su...
Specific aspects of semi-solid dosage forms for topical application include the nature of the barrier to be overcome, aspects of susceptibility to physical and chemical instability, and a greater influence of sensory perception. Advances in understan...
One of the key scientific aspects of small-molecule drug discovery and development is the analysis of the relationship between its chemical structure and biological activity. Understanding the effects that lead to significant changes in biological ac...
A year after the initial outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus remains a serious threat to global health, while current treatment options are insufficient to bring major improvements. The aim of this study is to identify repurpos...
Oral drugs classified under Class III of the Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS) are defined by high aqueous solubility yet low intestinal permeability. Their restricted oral bioavailability arises not from inadequate dissolution, but is pri...
Since its outbreak in December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the death of more than 6.5 million people around the world. The high transmissibility of its causative agent, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, coupled with its potentially lethal outcome, pro...
Membrane transporters have a crucial role in compounds’ brain drug delivery. They allow not only the penetration of a wide variety of different compounds to cross the endothelial cells of the blood–brain barrier (BBB), but also the accumu...
Sortase A (SrtA) of Staphylococcus aureus has long been shown to be a relevant molecular target for antibacterial development. Moreover, the designed SrtA inhibitors act via the antivirulence mechanism, potentially causing less evolutional pressure a...
Amorphous solid dispersions (ASDs) have emerged as widespread formulations for drug delivery of poorly soluble active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Predicting the API solubility with various carriers in the API–carrier mixture and the prin...
Drug development costs can be significantly reduced if proven “platform” technologies are allowed to be used without having to validate their use. The most recent US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guideline brings more clarity, as wel...
Human respiratory viruses represent a major global health burden, causing millions of severe infections and deaths annually. Despite the central role of vaccines in prevention, their limitations, such as incomplete coverage, waning immunity, and vuln...
The US FDA’s new guideline suggests using “Generally Accepted Science Knowledge” (GASK) to develop nonclinical testing protocols for developing drugs and biologicals to remove unnecessary testing. Interpreting acceptable scientific...
We describe a strategy for the development of a rational approach of neoplastic disease therapy based on the demonstration that scale-free networks are susceptible to specific attacks directed against its connective hubs. This strategy involves the (...
Pharmacovigilance, which is the science and activities relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other possible drug-related problems, generates knowledge to facilitate the rational use of medicines...
The design and discovery of novel drug candidates are the initial and most probably the crucial steps in the drug development process. One of the tasks of medicinal chemistry is to produce new molecules that have a desired biological effect. However,...
The early and late development of new anticancer drugs, small molecules or peptides can be slowed down by some issues such as poor selectivity for the target or poor ADME properties. Computer-aided drug design (CADD) and target drug delivery (TDD) te...
With rapidly growing knowledge in bioinformatics related to peptides and proteins, amino acid-based drug-design strategies have recently gained importance in pharmaceutics. In the past, peptide-based biomedicines were not widely used due to the assoc...
Nucleic acid and genetic medicines are increasingly being developed, owing to their potential to treat a variety of intractable diseases. A comprehensive understanding of the in vivo fate of these agents is vital for the rational design, discovery, a...
Rational drug design aims to develop pharmaceutical agents that impart maximal therapeutic benefits via their interaction with their intended biological targets. In the past several decades, advances in computational tools that inform wet-lab techniq...
It is over 50 years since the discovery of microtubules, and they have become one of the most important drug targets for anti-cancer therapies. Microtubules are predominantly composed of the protein tubulin, which contains a number of different bindi...
In this review, we present a timeline that shows the origin of mixed chelate copper (II) complexes, registered as Mark Title Casiopeínas®, as the first copper (II) compounds proposed as anticancer drugs in 1988 and 1992. In the late twenti...
The development of antimicrobial drugs with novel structures and clear mechanisms of action that are active against drug-resistant bacteria has become an urgent need of safeguarding human health due to the rise of bacterial drug resistance. The disco...
We report the results of our in silico study of approved drugs as potential treatments for COVID-19. The study is based on the analysis of normal modes of proteins. The drugs studied include chloroquine, ivermectin, remdesivir, sofosbuvir, boceprevir...
The rational design of mixed micellar systems has emerged as a cornerstone of modern nanomedicine, offering unprecedented control over the solubility and bioavailability of challenging therapeutic agents. This review provides a comprehensive analysis...
Canada has a long and rich history of ground-breaking research in drug delivery within academic institutions, pharmaceutical industry and the biotechnology community. Drug delivery refers to approaches, formulations, technologies, and systems for tra...
Structure-based and computer-aided drug design approaches are commonly considered to have been successful in the fields of cancer and antiviral drug discovery but not as much for antibacterial drug development. The search for novel anti-tuberculosis...
Computational approaches have accelerated novel therapeutic discovery in recent decades. The Computational Analysis of Novel Drug Opportunities (CANDO) platform for shotgun multitarget therapeutic discovery, repurposing, and design aims to improve th...
The discovery and development of new pharmaceutical drugs is a costly, time-consuming, and highly manual process, with significant challenges in ensuring drug bioavailability at target sites. Computational techniques are highly employed in drug desig...
Advances in research have boosted therapy development for congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG), a group of rare genetic disorders affecting protein and lipid glycosylation and glycosylphosphatidylinositol anchor biosynthesis. The (re)use of kn...
Platinum-based drugs are widely used in chemotherapy for various types of cancer and are considered crucial. Tetravalent platinum (Pt(IV)) compounds have gained significant attention and have been extensively researched among these drugs. Traditional...
Bismuth-based drugs have been used primarily to treat ulcers caused by Helicobacter pylori and other gastrointestinal ailments. Combined with antibiotics, these drugs also possess synergistic activity, making them ideal for multiple therapy regimens...
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...
The tumor microenvironment (TME) acts as a major barrier to effective drug delivery and contributes to drug resistance in solid tumors. Hypoxia, acidosis, and elevated interstitial fluid pressure limit drug penetration, while cancer-associated fibrob...
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