Artesunate acts through cytochrome c to inhibit growth of pediatric AML cells.

Artesunate is a derivative of artemisinin, an active compound isolated from Artemisia annua which has been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine and to treat malaria worldwide. Artemisinin derivatives have exhibited anti-cancer activity against both solid tumors and leukemia. The direct target(s) of artesunate are controversial; although, heme-bound proteins in the mitochondria have been implicated.

FDA Approaches in Monitoring Drug Quality, Forces Impacting the Drug Quality, and Recent Alternative Strategies to Assess Quality in the US Drug Supply.

Since the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began monitoring the quality of pharmaceutical manufacturing by enforcing current good manufacturing practices roughly 60 years ago, forces related to the global economy have changed, rendering the task of monitoring quality more difficult. Alternative strategies by groups like Valisure, LLC, and the University of Kentucky Drug Quality Study to monitor the quality of the currently circulated US drug supply through end-product testing and screening have resulted in several concerning findings. Given the successful approaches of identifying quality defects in pharmaceuticals by non-regulatory bodies, and considering the changing landscape and pressures on manufacturing, the FDA, large buying groups, and the US Department of Defense should consider these alternative strategies as a means to augment current regulatory activities.

AACC Guidance Document on Laboratory Testing for the Assessment of Preterm Delivery.

Identifying women with preterm labor who will go on to deliver prematurely is crucial to improving outcomes for mother and baby and for saving healthcare resources. Even among those with symptoms, the number of women who deliver preterm is low, and thus the low positive predictive value (PPV) and high negative predictive value (NPV) associated with available biomarkers does not substantially reduce the uncertainty of the clinical diagnosis. While there is some promise in the use of fetal fibronectin (fFN), interleukin 6 (IL-6), or placental alpha microglobulin 1 (PAMG-1) for predicting preterm birth (PTB), their use is unlikely to provide considerable clinical value in populations with a low prevalence.

Submillisecond Dynamics of Mastoparan X Insertion into Lipid Membranes.

The mechanism of protein insertion into a lipid bilayer is poorly understood because the kinetics of this process is difficult to measure. We developed a new approach to study insertion of the antimicrobial peptide Mastoparan X into zwitterionic lipid vesicles, using a laser-induced temperature-jump to initiate insertion on the microsecond time scale and infrared and fluorescence spectroscopies to follow the kinetics. Infrared probes the desolvation of the peptide backbone and yields biphasic kinetics with relaxation lifetimes of 12 and 117 μs, whereas fluorescence probes the intrinsic tryptophan residue located near the N-terminus and yields a single exponential phase with a lifetime of 440 μs.

Quantum dots encapsulated within phospholipid membranes: phase-dependent structure, photostability, and site-selective functionalization.

Lipid vesicle encapsulation is an efficient approach to transfer quantum dots (QDs) into aqueous solutions, which is important for renewable energy applications and biological imaging. However, little is known about the molecular organization at the interface between a QD and lipid membrane. To address this issue, we investigated the properties of 3.

Dynamics of the gel to fluid phase transformation in unilamellar DPPC vesicles.

The dynamics of the gel to fluid phase transformation in 100 nm large unilamellar vesicles (LUV) of 1,2-dipalmitoyl(d62)-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (d62-DPPC), has been studied by laser-induced temperature-jump initiation coupled with time-resolved infrared spectroscopy and by MD simulations. The infrared transients that characterize the temperature dependent phase transformation are complex, extending from the nanosecond to the millisecond time scales. An initial fast (submicrosecond) component can be modeled by partial melting of the gel domains, initiated at pre-existing defects at the edges of the faceted structure of the gel phase.