Search results for " DISCOVERY"

Cyclo- and Polyphosphazenes for Biomedical Applications

2022

Cyclic and polyphosphazenes are extremely interesting and versatile substrates characterized by the presence of -P=N- repeating units. The chlorine atoms on the P atoms in the starting materials can be easily substituted with a variety of organic substituents, thus giving rise to a huge number of new materials for industrial applications. Their properties can be designed considering the number of repetitive units and the nature of the substituent groups, opening up to a number of peculiar properties, including the ability to give rise to supramolecular arrangements. We focused our attention on the extensive scientific literature concerning their biomedical applications: as antimicrobial age…

Proteomics in antitumor research

2006

Proteins are the molecular players of fine-tuned regulatory pathways that underlie the behavior of any cell type. Derangement of this wide protein circuitry has a profound effect on cell life and ultimately contributes to the development of diseases such as cancer. New proteomic technologies are rapidly evolving to define and characterize the nodes of this altered protein network, both inside and outside cancer cells. Hopefully, these technologies will become user-friendly laboratory tools to improve cancer management from early detection to the development of rational and patient-tailored therapeutic strategies.

Fighting Antibiotic Resistance: New Pyrimidine-Clubbed Benzimidazole Derivatives as Potential DHFR Inhibitors

2023

The present work describes the design and development of seventeen pyrimidine-clubbed benzimidazole derivatives as potential dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) inhibitors. These compounds were filtered by using ADMET, drug-likeness characteristics calculations, and molecular docking experiments. Compounds 27, 29, 30, 33, 37, 38, and 41 were chosen for the synthesis based on the results of the in silico screening. Each of the synthesized compounds was tested for its in vitro antibacterial and antifungal activities using a variety of strains. All the compounds showed antibacterial properties against Gram-positive bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus and Staphylococcus pyogenes) as well as Gram-negativ…

Intrusion detection applications using knowledge discovery and data mining

2014

Causality-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Advanced Image Classification and Generation

2023

Smart manufacturing uses emerging deep learning models, and particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), for different industrial diagnostics tasks, e.g., classification, detection, recognition, prediction, synthetic data generation, security, etc., on the basis of image data. In spite of being efficient for these objectives, the majority of current deep learning models lack interpretability and explainability. They can discover features hidden within input data together with their mutual co-occurrence. However, they are weak at discovering and making explicit hidden causalities between the features, which could be the reason behind the parti…

Molecular Mechanisms of the Blockage of Glioblastoma Motility

2021

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and lethal brain tumor. GBM has a remarkable degree of motility and is able to infiltrate the healthy brain. In order to perform a rationale-based drug-repositioning study, we have used known inhibitors of two small Rho GTPases, Rac1 and Cdc42, which are upregulated in GBM and are involved in the signaling processes underlying the orchestration of the cytoskeleton and cellular motility. The selected inhibitors (R-ketorolac and ML141 for Cdc42 and R-ketorolac and EHT 1864 for Rac1) have been successfully employed to reduce the infiltration propensity of GBM in live cell imaging studies. Complementarily, all-atom simulations have elucidated the molecular …

Phenolic Profiles, Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory Activities of Hydrodistillation Wastewaters from Five Lamiaceae Species

2022

Distillation is the most widely used method to obtain an essential oil from plant material. The biomass used in the process is returned as a solid residue together with variable amounts of water rich in water-soluble compounds, which currently are not addressed to any further application. The scope of this work was to evaluate the phytochemical composition of wastewaters coming from hydrodistillation (DWWs) of five aromatic plants belonging to the Lamiaceae family, and to assess their in vitro antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. The phenolic profiles of the DWWs were determined by HPLC-DAD and HPLC-ESI/MS. Free radical scavenging ability, oxygen radical antioxidant capacity and su…

Radiolabeling of Nanoparticles and Polymers for PET Imaging

2014

Nanomedicine has become an emerging field in imaging and therapy of malignancies. Nanodimensional drug delivery systems have already been used in the clinic, as carriers for sensitive chemotherapeutics or highly toxic substances. In addition, those nanodimensional structures are further able to carry and deliver radionuclides. In the development process, non-invasive imaging by means of positron emission tomography (PET) represents an ideal tool for investigations of pharmacological profiles and to find the optimal nanodimensional architecture of the aimed-at drug delivery system. Furthermore, in a personalized therapy approach, molecular imaging modalities are essential for patient screeni…

Improvements and applications of the elements of prototype-based clustering

2018

Clustering or cluster analysis is an essential part of data mining, machine learning, and pattern recognition. The most popularly applied clustering methods are partitioning-based or prototype-based methods. Prototype-based clustering methods usually have easy implementability and good scalability. These methods, such as K-means clustering, have been used for different applications in various fields. On the other hand, prototype-based clustering methods are typically sensitive to initialization, and the selection of the number of clusters for knowledge discovery purposes is not straightforward. In the era of big data, in high-velocity, ever-growing datasets, which can also be erroneous, outl…

Targeting the mevalonate pathway for improved anticancer therapy.

2009

The mevalonate pathway is important for the generation of isoprene moieties thereby providing the basis for the biosynthesis of molecules required for maintaining membrane integrity, steroid production and cell respiration. Additionally, isoprene precursors are indispensable for the prenylation of regulatory proteins such as Ras and Ras-homologous (Rho) GTPases. These low molecular GTP-binding proteins play key roles in numerous signal transduction pathways stimulated upon activation of cell surface receptors by ligand binding. Thus, Ras/Rho proteins eventually regulate cell proliferation, tumor progression and cell death induced by anticancer therapeutics. Lipid modification of Ras/Rho pro…