Publications by authors named "Maria L Di Gioia"

Hypertension affects 32% of adults worldwide, leading to a significant global consumption of cardiovascular medications. Atenolol, a β-adrenergic receptor blocker, is widely prescribed for cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, angina pectoris, and myocardial infarction. According to the Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS), atenolol belongs to Class III, characterized by high solubility but low permeability.

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Atenolol, one of the top five best-selling drugs in the world today used to treat angina and hypertension, and to reduce the risk of death after a heart attack, faces challenges in current synthetic methods to address inefficiencies and environmental concerns. The traditional synthesis of this drug involves a process that generates a large amount of waste and other by-products that need disposal. This study presents a one-pot DES-based sustainable protocol for synthesizing atenolol.

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The limited solubility of natural cellulose in water and common organic solvents hinders its diverse applications, despite being one of the most abundant and easily accessible biopolymers on Earth. Chemical derivatization, such as cellulose carbamate (CC), offers a pathway to enhance both solubility and industrial processability. In this study, CC was synthesized by exploiting a novel type IV deep eutectic solvent (DES) composed of erbium trichloride and urea.

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The sustainability of amide bond formation is an ever-present topic in the pharmaceutical industry, as it represents the common motif in many clinically approved drugs. Despite many procedures for accomplishing eco-friendly amide synthesis having been developed, this transformation still remains a contemporary challenge. Herein, we report a greener approach for amide synthesis by using Reactive Deep Eutectic Solvents (RDESs) acting as both the reaction medium and reactants.

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The growing demand for drug carriers and green-technology-based tissue engineering materials has enabled the fabrication of different types of micro- and nano-assemblies. Hydrogels are a type of material that have been extensively investigated in recent decades. Their physical and chemical properties, such as hydrophilicity, resemblance to living systems, swelling ability and modifiability, make them suitable to be exploited for many pharmaceutical and bioengineering applications.

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Owing to a growing awareness toward environmental impact, the use of safer and eco-friendly solvents like deep eutectic solvents (DESs), has recently undergone important growth in the pharmaceutical field, with regard to their application as non-aqueous liquid administration vehicles, since they do not carry the same risks of toxicity and handling as traditional organic solvents. Major attention has been given to the development of advantageous transdermal drug delivery systems, because of their ease of use and better acceptability. Here, we report the use of two different DESs, based on choline chloride, used as hydrogen bond acceptor (HBA), and ascorbic acid or propylene glycol, used as hydrogen bond donors (HBDs), able to enhance the solubility and the topical delivery of dapsone, representing a class IV drug.

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In this work, bio-based membranes prepared using a crosslinked β-glucans-chitosan dispersed in the chitosan matrix useful in promoting wound healing were studied for the first-time. Wound healing is a process that includes sequential steps designed to restore the structure and function of damaged cells and tissue. To minimize damage and the risk of infection during the healing process and to promote restoration of the integrity of damaged tissue, the wound should be dressed.

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A widely investigated approach to bypass the blood brain barrier is represented by the intranasal delivery of therapeutic agents exploiting the olfactory or trigeminal connections nose-brain. As for Parkinson's disease (PD), characterized by dopaminergic midbrain neurons degeneration, currently there is no disease modifying therapy. Although several bio-nanomaterials have been evaluated for encapsulation of neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) or dopaminergic drugs in order to restore the DA content in parkinsonian patients, the premature leakage of the therapeutic agent limits this approach.

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The formation of the amide bond is among the most commonly performed transformations in the pharmaceutical industry and the wider chemical industry. The current methods for its installation in organic compounds frequently rely on the use of large amounts of organic solvents, mainly -dimethylformamide (DMF), -methylpyrrolidone (NMP), and dichloromethane (DCM), which have been associated with adverse environmental and health concerns over the last decades. This fact led academia and industry to make significant efforts toward the development of synthetic routes with the aim to avoid, reduce or replace the use of hazardous solvents.

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The most common route of administration of ophthalmic drugs is the topical route because it is convenient, non-invasive, and accessible to all patients. Unfortunately, drugs administered topically are not able to reach effective concentrations. Moreover, their bioavailability must be improved to decrease the frequency of administrations and their side effects, and to increase their therapeutic efficiency.

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Article Synopsis
  • Recent studies show that fruits and vegetables are key sources of bioactive compounds, with food processing waste often containing equal or higher antioxidant levels.
  • Environmental concerns about increasing agricultural and food waste have led to a push for sustainable methods to transform this waste into valuable products.
  • Tomato byproducts are highlighted as a promising, low-cost source of antioxidants, and the text reviews methods for extracting carotenoids and their potential industrial uses.
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Herein, the synthesis of a novel polymeric conjugate N,O-CMCS-Dopamine (DA) based on an amide linkage is reported. The performances of this conjugate were compared with those of an analogous N,O-CMCS-DA ester conjugate previously studied (Cassano et al., 2020) to gain insight into their potential utility for Parkinson's disease treatment.

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Covering: 2005 up to 2020Olive bioactive secoiridoids are recognized as natural antioxidants with multiple beneficial effects on human health. Nevertheless, the study of their biological activity has also disclosed some critical aspects associated with their application. Firstly, only a few of them can be extracted in large amounts from their natural matrix, namely olive leaves, drupes, oil and olive mill wastewater.

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Natural products and herbal therapies represent a thriving field of research, but methods for the production of plant-derived compounds with a significative biological activity by synthetic methods are required. Conventional commercial production by chemical synthesis or solvent extraction is not yet sustainable and economical because toxic solvents are used, the process involves many steps, and there is generally a low amount of the product produced, which is often mixed with other or similar by-products. For this reason, alternative, sustainable, greener, and more efficient processes are required.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study focuses on creating new carboxylated chitosan-dopamine and chitosan-tyrosine conjugates to enhance the delivery of dopamine to the brain via nasal administration.
  • - Various chemical reactions were used to synthesize these conjugates, and they were characterized using advanced techniques to assess their properties and safety in simulated nasal environments.
  • - Results indicate that the N,O-carboxymethyl chitosan-dopamine conjugate shows excellent mucoadhesive capabilities and is non-toxic, suggesting it has potential as an effective method for delivering dopamine to the brain.
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In this new century, sustainable development challenges chemical sciences to develop new and clean technological processes. The agri-food industry produces significant quantities of waste, raising significant economic and environmental concerns. Food waste valorization using environmentally friendly procedures is of increasing importance.

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Cellulose is the main component of lignocellulosic biomass. Its direct chemocatalytic conversion into lactic acid (LA), a powerful biobased chemical platform, represents an important, and more easily scalable alternative to the fermentative way. In this paper, we present the selective hydrothermal conversion of cellulose and simple sugars into LA, under mild reaction conditions in presence of ErCl grafted on the mesoporous silica (MCM-41) surface.

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Nucleobase-containing isoxazolidines spiro-bonded to an indane core have been synthesized in very good yields by regio- and diastereoselective 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition starting from indanyl nitrones and -vinylnucleobases by using environmentally benign microwave technology. The contemporary presence of various structural groups that are individually active scaffolds of different typology of drugs, has directed us to speculate that these compounds may act as inhibitors of MDM2-p53 interaction. Therefore, both computational calculations and antiproliferative screening against A549 human lung adenocarcinoma cells and human SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells were carried out to support this hypothesis.

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The exploitation and use of alternative synthetic methods, in the face of classical procedures that do not conform to the ethics of green chemistry, represent an ever-present problem in the pharmaceutical industry. The procedures for the synthesis of benzimidazoles have become a focus in synthetic organic chemistry, as they are building blocks of strong interest for the development of compounds with pharmacological activity. Various benzimidazole derivatives exhibit important activities such as antimicrobial, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, and analgesic activities, and some of the already synthesized compounds have found very strong applications in medicine praxis.

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In the present work, the anti-proliferative and anti-bacterial activities of three semi-synthetic benzoate pinocembrin derivatives, isolated from the aerial parts of L., were investigated. As occurs in most natural compounds, the bioavailability of pinocembrin is very poor, therefore it should be improved by chemical strategies aimed to prolong its shelf life and, consequently, its activity.

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We synthesized a series of small symmetrical unsaturated disulfides by a multi-step reaction starting from organic alcohols, and we performed a preliminary test to evaluate the effect of these compounds on the viability of A549 lung cancer cells. The garlic-derived natural compound diallyl disulfide, known for its anticancer activity, was used as the lead compound in this study. We synthesized five DADS analogues having different carbon chain lengths and different positions of the double bonds.

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A series of ketonitrones derived from isatin and indanone (INs) were synthesized and evaluated for their antiproliferative activities against several human cancer cell lines. Then, the antioxidant properties of these substrates were measured by the DPPH test to report their biological activity in terms of their action. In particular, one substrate has showed very high biological and scavenging activity, probably due to the strong correlation between its spin trapping activity and structure.

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The development of novel synthetic routes to produce bioactive compounds starting from renewable sources has become an important research area in organic and medicinal chemistry. Here, we present a low-cost procedure for the tunable and selective conversion of biomass-produced furfural to cyclopentenone derivatives using a mixture of choline chloride and urea as a biorenewable deep eutectic solvent (DES). The proposed medium is a nontoxic, biodegradable, and could be reused up to four times without any unfavorable effect on the reaction yield.

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This work concerns on the preparation and performance evaluation of a new chitosan hydroquinone based gauze for hemostatic use. Chitosan and hydroquinone were firstly connected by etherification and then linked to the pre-carboxylate gauze. The functionalized material and the chitosan-hydroquinone ether were characterized by Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) Spectroscopy and Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC).

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