The pharmacological phenomena of enhancement and potentiation of uterine response occur respectively when combinations of some prostaglandins and oxytocin are given serially and simultaneously to a patient. Employing these phenomena allows small doses of the drugs to achieve the same effects as a large dose given alone. In a pilot study of the use of the combination of prostaglandin and oxytoci...

Basic biophysical studies and pharmacological processes can be investigated by mimicking the intracellular and extracellular environments across an artificial cell membrane construct. The ability to reproduce in vitro simplified scenarios found in live cell membranes in an automated manner has great potential for a variety of synthetic biology and compound screening applications. Here, we prese...

A number of nanotechnology-enabled drug delivery platforms are in varying stages of drug development. While, physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modelling has become a well-established tool for conventional medicines from preclinical to post-licensing environments, its application for nanomedicines is in its infancy. Part of the reason for this is that the fundamental mechanisms that u...

Protein crystallography represents at present the most productive and most widely used method to obtain structural information on target proteins and protein-ligand complexes within the atomic resolution range. The knowledge obtained in this way is essential for understanding the biology, chemistry, and biochemistry of proteins and their functions but also for the development of compounds of hi...

This brief sketch is intended as an introduction to a series of articles 1 on bioelectrical phenomena, its purpose being to present certain fundamental facts and underlying conceptions. Early in the course of the investigation it became evident that there are great advantages in using single cells in place of tissues. The experiments were accordingly made with single (multinucleate) cells of Va...

A promising strategy for the treatment of genetic diseases, pharmacological chaperone therapy, has been proposed recently. It exploits small molecules which can be administered orally, reach difficult tissues such as the brain and have low cost. This strategy has a vast field of application. In order to make drug development as fast as possible, it is important to exploit drug repositioning. We...

Combination therapies exploit the chances for better efficacy, decreased toxicity, and reduced development of drug resistance and owing to these advantages, have become a standard for the treatment of several diseases and continue to represent a promising approach in indications of unmet medical need. In this context, studying the effects of a combination of drugs in order to provide evidence o...

The lectin chaperone calnexin (Cnx) is important for quality control of glycoproteins, and the chances of correct folding of a protein increase the longer the protein interacts with Cnx. Mutations in glycoproteins increase their association with Cnx, and these mutant proteins are retained in the endoplasmic reticulum. However, until now, the increased interaction with Cnx was not known to incre...

OBJECTIVE To explore the non-pharmacological correlates of the perceived effectiveness of antidepressants (ADs), thereby enhancing understanding of the mechanisms involved in recovery from depression while taking ADs. METHOD An online survey was completed by 1781 New Zealand adults who had taken ADs in the previous 5 years. RESULTS All 18 psychosocial variables measured were associated with...

Protein conformational disorders, which include certain types of retinitis pigmentosa, are a set of inherited human diseases in which mutant proteins are misfolded and often aggregated. Many opsin mutants associated with retinitis pigmentosa, the most common being P23H, are misfolded and retained within the cell. Here, we describe a pharmacological chaperone, 11-cis-7-ring retinal, that quantit...