scholarly journals Pharmaceuticals from natural products: current trends

2002 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER R. SEIDL

The use of products extracted from plants for medicinal purposes can be traced to the beginnings of civilization and up until the end of the nineteenth century natural products were the principal source of medicines. Since then their relative importance has oscillated according to the strategies of large pharmaceutical companies. Now that these strategies are changing, there are new opportunities for countries like Brazil, in which a large proportion of the world's biodiversity is located. There are, however, new circumstances that must be taken into consideration: material must be collected by groups which are formally authorized to do so and under the conditions of the Convention of Biological Diversity, the discovery process is being successively outsourced to smaller specialized firms and there is a growing integration with producers of cosmetics and phytomedicines.

Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Nolan J. Argyle ◽  
Gerald A. Merwin

Privatization, contracting out, and a host of other current trends blur the line between public and private—they create what at best is a fuzzy line. This study examines yet one additional area where the lines between public and private have gotten even fuzzier—the best selling novel. It uses the writings of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler,two authors whose names on a novel guarantee best-seller status. It will do so in the context of what a civic community and civil society are, and how they relate to the public-private question, a question that has renewed life in public administration.


Author(s):  
Gordon Moore ◽  
John A. Quelch ◽  
Emily Boudreau

Whenever consumers make a choice—in healthcare or in other situations—they do so based on the benefits they anticipate. Chapter 5 focuses on the most common benefits consumers seek when making health and wellness decisions. Though they may vary in relative importance based upon the healthcare decision at hand, these six commonly sought benefits are economy, effectiveness, empathy, efficiency, empowerment, and experience. This chapter reviews each of these benefits in-depth, highlighting examples of each in today’s market. Consumers have different ways of assessing these benefits ranging from simultaneously trading off importance between them to using four shortcuts that make comparisons easier.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 546
Author(s):  
Miroslava Nedyalkova ◽  
Vasil Simeonov

A cheminformatics procedure for a partitioning model based on 135 natural compounds including Flavonoids, Saponins, Alkaloids, Terpenes and Triterpenes with drug-like features based on a descriptors pool was developed. The knowledge about the applicability of natural products as a unique source for the development of new candidates towards deadly infectious disease is a contemporary challenge for drug discovery. We propose a partitioning scheme for unveiling drug-likeness candidates with properties that are important for a prompt and efficient drug discovery process. In the present study, the vantage point is about the matching of descriptors to build the partitioning model applied to natural compounds with diversity in structures and complexity of action towards the severe diseases, as the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus. In the times of the de novo design techniques, such tools based on a chemometric and symmetrical effect by the implied descriptors represent another noticeable sign for the power and level of the descriptors applicability in drug discovery in establishing activity and target prediction pipeline for unknown drugs properties.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 965
Author(s):  
Irina Stipanovic ◽  
Zaharah Allah Bukhsh ◽  
Cormac Reale ◽  
Kenneth Gavin

Aged earthworks constitute a major proportion of European rail infrastructures, the replacement and remediation of which poses a serious problem. Considering the scale of the networks involved, it is infeasible both in terms of track downtime and money to replace all of these assets. It is, therefore, imperative to develop a rational means of managing slope infrastructure to determine the best use of available resources and plan maintenance in order of criticality. To do so, it is necessary to not just consider the structural performance of the asset but also to consider the safety and security of its users, the socioeconomic impact of remediation/failure and the relative importance of the asset to the network. This paper addresses this by looking at maintenance planning on a network level using multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT). MAUT is a methodology that allows one to balance the priorities of different objectives in a harmonious fashion allowing for a holistic means of ranking assets and, subsequently, a rational means of investing in maintenance. In this situation, three different attributes are considered when examining the utility of different maintenance options, namely availability (the user cost), economy (the financial implications) and structural reliability (the structural performance and subsequent safety of the structure). The main impact of this paper is to showcase that network maintenance planning can be carried out proactively in a manner that is balanced against the needs of the organization.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
William A. Cohen

Vanity Fair (1848) famously opens with a departure. As Becky Sharpe flounces off from Miss Pinkerton's academy, she takes leave of her patron by telling her “in a very unconcerned manner … and with a perfect accent, ‘Mademoiselle, je viens vous faire mes adieux.’” Miss Pinkerton, we learn, “did not understand French, she only directed those who did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed head … said, ‘Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning’” (7). This performance of befuddlement on the part of a respectable schoolmistress bespeaks a whole collection of Victorian cultural norms about language competence in general and about the French language in particular. Even though the action is set in a period when Becky's speaking “French with purity and a Parisian accent … [was] rather a rare accomplishment” (11), the novel was written for a mid-nineteenth-century audience that could mainly count on middle-class young ladies to have acquired this degree of refinement—or at least to aspire to do so.


1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Burchell

Studies of the Massachusetts communities of Newburyport and Boston have revealed a high rate of geographical mobility for their populations, in excess of what had been previously thought. Because of the difficulty in tracing out-migrants these works have concentrated on persisters, though to do so is to give an incomplete picture of communal progress. Peter R. Knights in his study of Boston between 1830 and 1860 attempted to follow his out-migrants but was only able to trace some 27 per cent of them. The problem of out-migration is generally regarded as being too large for solution through human effort, but important enough now to engage the computer. What follows bears on the subject of out-migration, for it is an analysis of where part of the migrating populations of the east went in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, namely to San Francisco.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 689-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
HERMAN PAUL

Historical epistemology is a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation” (Lorraine Daston). Under this umbrella, historians have been studying the changing meanings of “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and other virtues believed to be conducive to good scholarship. While endorsing this historicization of virtues and their corresponding vices, the present article argues that the meaning and relative importance of these virtues and vices can only be determined if their mutual dependencies are taken into account. Drawing on a detailed case study—a controversy that erupted among nineteenth-century orientalists over the publication of R. P. A. Dozy'sDe Israëlieten te Mekka(The Israelites in Mecca) (1864)—the paper shows that nineteenth-century orientalists were careful to examine (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced the virtues they considered most important, (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other ones, (3) the extent to which these virtues were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which they were expected to be balanced by future scholars’ work. Consequently, this article argues that historical epistemology might want to abandon its single-virtue focus in order to allow balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between virtues and vices to move to the center of attention.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shimon Ohtani

Abstract The importance of biodiversity conservation is gradually being recognized worldwide, and 2020 was the final year of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets formulated at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP10) in 2010. Unfortunately, the majority of the targets were assessed as unachievable. While it is essential to measure public awareness of biodiversity when setting the post-2020 targets, it is also a difficult task to propose a method to do so. This study provides a diachronic exploration of the discourse on “biodiversity” from 2010 to 2020, using Twitter posts, in combination with sentiment analysis and topic modeling, which are commonly used in data science. Through the aggregation and comparison of n-grams, the visualization of eight types of emotional tendencies using the NRC emotion lexicon, the construction of topic models using Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and the qualitative analysis of tweet texts based on these models, I was able to classify and analyze unstructured tweets in a meaningful way. The results revealed the evolution of words used with “biodiversity” on Twitter over the past decade, the emotional tendencies behind the contexts in which “biodiversity” has been used, and the approximate content of tweet texts that have constituted topics with distinctive characteristics. While the search for people's awareness through SNS analysis still has many limitations, it is undeniable that important suggestions can be obtained. In order to further refine the research method, it will be essential to improve the skills of analysts and accumulate research examples as well as to advance data science.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document