The field of specific drug delivery is an expanding research domain. Besides the use of liposomes formed from various lipids, natural and synthetic polymers have been developed to prepare more efficient drug delivery systems either under macromolecular prodrugs or under particulate nanovectors. To ameliorate the biocompatibility of such nanocarriers, degradable natural or synthetic polymers hav...

Even though natural products has an excellent record as a source for new drugs, the advent of ultrahigh-throughput screening and large-scale combinatorial synthetic methods, has caused a decline in the use of natural products research in the pharmaceutical industry. This is due to the efficiency in generating and screening a high number of synthetic combinatorial compounds; whereas traditional ...

Background and Objective: During the last two decades it was proven that turmeric is a potent herbal. Curcumin has been subjected to a variety of antimicrobial activity due to extensive traditional uses and less side effects. Antimicrobial activity for curcumin against different bacterial strains has been already reported. Indeed, numerous investigations have been carried out to amplify the ant...

In recent years there has been an important development in different dosage forms for existing and newly designed drugs and natural products, semisynthetic as well as synthetic excipients often need to be used for a variety of purposes. Gums and mucilages are widely used natural materials for conventional and novel dosage forms. With the increasing interest in polymers of natural origin, the ph...

3.1. Chapter 1. Critical overview of the use of isolated organs in opioid research 3.2. Chapter 2. Pharmacological characterisation of enkephalins, ?-endorphin and its fragments 3.3. Chapter 3. Development of potent analgesic enkephalin analogs such as (D-Met2,Pro5)-enkephalinamide 3.4. Chapter 4. Characterisation of structural principles for the receptor type-selectivity of enkephalin analogs ...

Secondary metabolites, which have vital environmental and allelopathic functions for a host, and long tradition of ethnopharmacological applications preceding modern medicinal use, often occur in their native state as glycosides. The role of sugar moiety looks completely different from plant physiology point of view and from drug discovery and development perspective. Based on a short survey of...

1Nano Medical Engineering Laboratory, RIKEN, Wako-shi, Saitama 351-0198, Japan 2Department of Environmental Chemistry and Engineering, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa 226-8502, Japan 3Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117602 4Department of B...

In this issue of the Journal, Fong et al. report the results of a phase 1 trial of a new cancer therapy involving 60 patients (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00516373).1 Readers may be surprised by the editors’ decision to publish a small early-stage trial, but this trial not only reports important results — it also points to a new direction in the development of anticancer drugs. Modern cancerd...

Cancerous diseases present a formidable health problem worldwide. While the chemotherapy of cancer, in conjunction with other treatment modalities, has reached a significant level of maturity, efficacious use of such agents is still restricted by numerous pharmacological deficiencies, such as poor water solubility, short serum circulation lifetimes, and low bioavailability resulting from lack o...

AS1411 (previously known as AGRO100) is a 26 nucleotide guanine-rich DNA aptamer which forms a guanine quadruplex structure. AS1411 has shown promising utility as a treatment for cancers in Phase I and Phase II clinical trials without causing major side-effects. AS1411 inhibits tumor cell growth by binding to nucleolin which is aberrantly expressed on the cell membrane of many tumors. In this s...