scholarly journals Cues from Sri Lankan Traditional Medicine to the Modern Drug Development Pipeline - for a Sustainable Future

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Vindya Udalamaththa ◽  
Udaya Samaratunga ◽  
Preethi Udagama
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-71
Author(s):  
Prativa Pandey ◽  
Angisha Basnet ◽  
Aatish Mali

The world is facing one of the biggest public health tragedies of our time, both in terms of socio-economic loss and death tolls due to the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. In a frantic race to find treatment for COVID-19, many interventions to discover drugs and vaccines are being expedited. Similarly, traditional herbal medicines are also being explored to find a cure for COVID-19. There are many traditional medicines that have exhibited promising antiviral and immuno-modulating properties against a plethora of infectious diseases like influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, and even COVID-19. Traditional medicine is an integral part of culture and practices in many countries with a vast and rich history of treating diseases. However, scientific research-based drug development approaches and effective regulatory mechanisms, on par with modern medicine, should be implemented to ensure safety, efficacy and overall validity of traditional medicine. Incorporating evidence-based traditional medicines in modern drug development paradigms can help assure affordability, accessibility and acceptability of the treatment approach. Furthermore, it can create pharmacological synergism to tackle drug resistance. Altogether, every country should create a roadmap for modernization and revival of traditional knowledge to improve the health care system and be better prepared for health crises.


Author(s):  
Tanay Dalvi ◽  
Bhaskar Dewangan ◽  
Rudradip Das ◽  
Jyoti Rani ◽  
Suchita Dattatray Shinde ◽  
...  

: The most common reason behind dementia is Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and it is predicted to be the third lifethreatening disease apart from stroke and cancer for the geriatric population. Till now only four drugs are available in the market for symptomatic relief. The complex nature of disease pathophysiology and lack of concrete evidences of molecular targets are the major hurdles for developing new drug to treat AD. The the rate of attrition of many advanced drugs at clinical stages, makes the de novo discovery process very expensive. Alternatively, Drug Repurposing (DR) is an attractive tool to develop drugs for AD in a less tedious and economic way. Therefore, continuous efforts are being made to develop a new drug for AD by repursing old drugs through screening and data mining. For example, the survey in the drug pipeline for Phase III clinical trials (till February 2019) which has 27 candidates, and around half of the number are drugs which have already been approved for other indications. Although in the past the drug repurposing process for AD has been reviewed in the context of disease areas, molecular targets, there is no systematic review of repurposed drugs for AD from the recent drug development pipeline (2019-2020). In this manuscript, we are reviewing the clinical candidates for AD with emphasis on their development history including molecular targets and the relevance of the target for AD.


MedChemComm ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inés González-Gil ◽  
Debora Zian ◽  
Henar Vázquez-Villa ◽  
Silvia Ortega-Gutiérrez ◽  
María L. López-Rodríguez

The current status of the LPA1receptor and its ligands in the drug development pipeline is reviewed.


Author(s):  
Maryam Hamzeh-Mivehroud ◽  
Babak Sokouti ◽  
Siavoush Dastmalchi

The need for the development of new drugs to combat existing and newly identified conditions is unavoidable. One of the important tools used in the advanced drug development pipeline is computer-aided drug design. Traditionally, to find a drug many ligands were synthesized and evaluated for their effectiveness using suitable bioassays and if all other drug-likeness features were met, the candidate(s) would possibly reach the market. Although this approach is still in use in advanced format, computational methods are an indispensable component of modern drug development projects. One of the methods used from very early days of rationalizing the drug design approaches is Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR). This chapter overviews QSAR modeling steps by introducing molecular descriptors, mathematical model development for relating biological activities to molecular structures, and model validation. At the end, several successful cases where QSAR studies were used extensively are presented.


Oncology ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 20-66
Author(s):  
Maryam Hamzeh-Mivehroud ◽  
Babak Sokouti ◽  
Siavoush Dastmalchi

The need for the development of new drugs to combat existing and newly identified conditions is unavoidable. One of the important tools used in the advanced drug development pipeline is computer-aided drug design. Traditionally, to find a drug many ligands were synthesized and evaluated for their effectiveness using suitable bioassays and if all other drug-likeness features were met, the candidate(s) would possibly reach the market. Although this approach is still in use in advanced format, computational methods are an indispensable component of modern drug development projects. One of the methods used from very early days of rationalizing the drug design approaches is Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR). This chapter overviews QSAR modeling steps by introducing molecular descriptors, mathematical model development for relating biological activities to molecular structures, and model validation. At the end, several successful cases where QSAR studies were used extensively are presented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
E. D. Pieterman ◽  
M. J. Sarink ◽  
C. Sala ◽  
S. T. Cole ◽  
J. E. M. de Steenwinkel ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT One of the reasons for the lengthy tuberculosis (TB) treatment is the difficulty to treat the nonmultiplying mycobacterial subpopulation. In order to assess the ability of (new) TB drugs to target this subpopulation, we need to incorporate dormancy models in our preclinical drug development pipeline. In most available dormancy models, it takes a long time to create a dormant state, and it is difficult to identify and quantify this nonmultiplying condition. The Mycobacterium tuberculosis 18b strain might overcome some of these problems, because it is dependent on streptomycin for growth and becomes nonmultiplying after 10 days of streptomycin starvation but still can be cultured on streptomycin-supplemented culture plates. We developed our 18b dormancy time-kill kinetics model to assess the difference in the activity of isoniazid, rifampin, moxifloxacin, and bedaquiline against log-phase growth compared to the nonmultiplying M. tuberculosis subpopulation by CFU counting, including a novel area under the curve (AUC)-based approach as well as time-to-positivity (TTP) measurements. We observed that isoniazid and moxifloxacin were relatively more potent against replicating bacteria, while rifampin and high-dose bedaquiline were equally effective against both subpopulations. Moreover, the TTP data suggest that including a liquid culture-based method could be of additional value, as it identifies a specific mycobacterial subpopulation that is nonculturable on solid media. In conclusion, the results of our study underline that the time-kill kinetics 18b dormancy model in its current form is a useful tool to assess TB drug potency and thus has its place in the TB drug development pipeline.


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