Piplartine attenuates aminoglycoside-induced TRPV1 activity and protects from hearing loss in mice.

Hearing loss is a major health concern in our society, affecting more than 400 million people worldwide. Among the causes, aminoglycoside therapy can result in permanent hearing loss in 40% to 60% of patients receiving treatment, and despite these high numbers, no drug for preventing or treating this type of hearing loss has yet been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. We have previously conducted high-throughput screenings of bioactive compounds, using zebrafish as our discovery platform, and identified piplartine as a potential therapeutic molecule.

Structure-Based Design and Synthesis of Covalent Inhibitors for Deubiquitinase and Acetyltransferase ChlaDUB1 of .

Upon infection by an intracellular pathogen, host cells activate apoptotic pathways to limit pathogen replication. Consequently, efficient proliferation of the obligate intracellular pathogen , a major cause of trachoma and sexually transmitted diseases, depends on the suppression of host cell apoptosis. secretes deubiquitinase ChlaDUB1 into the host cell, leading among other interactions to the stabilization of antiapoptotic proteins and, thus, suppression of host cell apoptosis.

Enhanced Hydrogen Bonding by Urea Functionalization Tunes the Stability and Biological Properties of Peptide Amphiphiles.

Self-assembled nanostructures such as those formed by peptide amphiphiles (PAs) are of great interest in biological and pharmacological applications. Herein, a simple and widely applicable chemical modification, a urea motif, was included in the PA's molecular structure to stabilize the nanostructures by virtue of intermolecular hydrogen bonds. Since the amino acid residue nearest to the lipid tail is the most relevant for stability, we decided to include the urea modification at that position.

Engineering a nanoantibiotic system displaying dual mechanism of action.

In recent decades, peptide amphiphiles (PAs) have established themselves as promising self-assembling bioinspired materials in a wide range of medical fields. Herein, we report a dual-therapeutic system constituted by an antimicrobial PA and a cylindrical protease inhibitor (LJC) to achieve broad antimicrobial spectrum and to enhance therapeutic efficacy. We studied two strategies: PA-LJC nanostructures () and PA nanostructures + free LJC ().

Structure-Activity Relationship Study to Develop Peptide Amphiphiles as Species-Specific Antimicrobials.

Antimicrobial peptide amphiphiles (PAs) are a promising class of molecules that can disrupt the bacterial membrane or act as drug nanocarriers. In this study, we prepared 33 PAs to establish supramolecular structure-activity relationships. We studied the morphology and activity of the nanostructures against different Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterial strains (such as Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii).

Design, Biological Evaluation, and Computer-Aided Analysis of Dihydrothiazepines as Selective Antichlamydial Agents.

(CT) causes the most prevalent sexually transmitted bacterial disease in the United States. The lack of drug selectivity is one of the main challenges of the current antichlamydial pharmacotherapy. The metabolic needs of CT are controlled, among others, by cylindrical proteases and their chaperones (, ClpX).

Pharmacophore modeling, molecular docking, and molecular dynamics studies to identify new 5-HTR antagonists with the potential for design of new atypical antipsychotics.

Some important atypical antipsychotic drugs target the serotonergic receptor 2A (5-HTR). Currently, new therapeutic strategies are needed to offer faster onset of action with fewer side effects and, therefore, greater efficacy in a substantial proportion of patients with neuropsychological disorders such as Autism and Parkinson. The main objective of this work was to use SBDD methods to identify new hit compounds potentially useful as precursors of novel and selective 5-HTR antagonists.

Targeting SARS-CoV-2 Receptor Binding Domain with Stapled Peptides: An Study.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has evolved into a pandemic of unprecedented scale. This coronavirus enters cells by the interaction of the receptor binding domain (RBD) with the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor (hACE2). In this study, we employed a rational structure-based design to propose 22-mer stapled peptides using the structure of the hACE2 α1 helix as a template.

Modeling structure-activity relationships of prodiginines with antimalarial activity using GA/MLR and OPS/PLS.

In the present study, we performed a multivariate quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis of 52 prodiginines with antimalarial activity. Variable selection was based on the genetic algorithm (GA) and ordered predictor selection (OPS) approaches, and the models were built using the multiple linear regression (MLR) and partial least squares (PLS) regression methods. The leave-N-out crossvalidation and y-randomization tests showed that the models were robust and free from chance correlation.