Cardiotoxicity, especially human ether-a-go-go-related gene (hERG)-related toxicity, is a leading cause of drug failure or market withdrawal. Reducing hERG binding to obviate potential cardiac toxicity is crucial. Nanotechnology has been applied to drug delivery for reducing drug toxicity and improving efficacy, but few studies have addressed hERG-related cardiotoxicity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Control Release
August 2025
The rise in antimicrobial resistance and the consequent ineffectiveness of conventional antibiotics emphasise the need for novel therapeutic strategies. Antisense nucleic acid mimics (NAMs) are emerging as promising precision therapeutic agents, inhibiting specific genes through hybridisation with selected nucleic acid targets. However, delivering NAMs into bacteria remains a significant challenge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe rapid emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant bacterial pathogens require the development of antibacterial agents that are robustly effective while inducing no toxicity or resistance development. In this context, we designed and synthesized amphiphilic dendrimers as antibacterial candidates. We report the promising potent antibacterial activity shown by the amphiphilic dendrimer , composed of a long hydrophobic alkyl chain and a tertiary amine-terminated poly(amidoamine) dendron, against a panel of Gram-negative bacteria, including multidrug-resistant and exhibited effective activity against drug-resistant bacterial infections in vivo.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModern medicine continues to struggle against antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens. Among the pathogens of critical concerns are the multidrug-resistant (MDR) , and . These pathogens are major causes of nosocomial infections among immunocompromised individuals, involving major organs such as lung, skin, spleen, kidney, liver, and bloodstream.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent years, immunotherapy for cancer treatment using monoclonal antibodies has shown clinical success, particularly with programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) and its ligand programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1). Dostarlimab, an immune checkpoint inhibitor, interacts with adaptive immunity by binding to human PD-1, inhibiting PD-L1 and PD-L2 interactions, and cross-talk with adaptive immunity. Recent clinical trials have shown that dostarlimab is effective in treating mismatch repair deficiency (dMMR) in endometrial cancer patients, leading to its approval in the United States and the European Union in 2021.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith the alarming and prevailing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) comes an urgent need for novel antimicrobial agents that are not only effective and robust but also do not induce resistance development. Amphiphilic dendrimers are emerging as a promising new paradigm to combat bacterial AMR. They can mimic antimicrobial peptides to produce potent antibacterial activity yet with a low likelihood of generating resistance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDendrimers are appealing scaffolds for creating carbohydrate mimics with unique multivalent cooperativity. We report here novel bola-amphiphilic glycodendrimers bearing mannose and glucose terminals, and a hydrophobic thioacetal core responsive to reactive oxygen species. The peculiar bola-amphiphilic feature enabled stronger binding to lectin compared to conventional amphiphiles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe alarming and prevailing antibiotic resistance crisis urgently calls for innovative "outside of the box" antibacterial agents, which can differ substantially from conventional antibiotics. In this context, we have established antibacterial candidates based on dynamic supramolecular dendrimer nanosystems self-assembled with amphiphilic dendrimers composed of a long hydrophobic alkyl chain and a small hydrophilic poly(amidoamine) dendron bearing distinct terminal functionalities. Remarkably, the amphiphilic dendrimer with amine terminals exhibited strong antibacterial activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative as well as drug-resistant bacteria, and prevented biofilm formation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe application of lipid-based drug delivery technologies for bioavailability enhancement of drugs has led to many successful products in the market for clinical use. Recent studies on amine-containing heterolipid-based synthetic vectors for delivery of siRNA have witnessed the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) approval of the first siRNA drug in the year 2018. The studies on various synthetic lipids investigated for delivery of such nucleic acid therapeutics have revealed that the surface p of the constructed nanoparticles plays an important role.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe obligatory testing of drug molecules and their impurities to protect users against toxic compounds seems to provide interesting opportunities for new drug discovery. Impurities, which proved to be non-toxic, may be explored for their own therapeutic potential and thus be a part of future drug discovery. The essential role of pharmaceutical analysis can thus be extended to achieve this purpose.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrent research has shown cell-penetrating peptides and antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) as probable vectors for use in drug delivery and as novel antibiotics. It has been reported that the higher the therapeutic index (TI) the higher would be the bacterial cell penetrating ability. To the best of our knowledge, no in-silico study has been performed to determine bacterial cell specificity of the antimicrobial cell penetrating peptides (aCPP's) based on their TI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCamptothecin (CPT) has a potent and broad-spectrum anti-tumor activity but its clinical use is limited due to its poor water solubility, stability at physiological conditions and toxicity. The aim of our study was to evaluate bicephalous heterolipid E1E for enhancing the solubility and stability of CPT through the development of a self-microemulsifying drug delivery system (SMEDDS). The solubility of CPT in heterolipid E1E was found to be 82 and 5.
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