Efficacy of teriparatide compared with risedronate on FRAX-defined major osteoporotic fractures: results of the VERO clinical trial.

Unlabelled: FRAX calculates the 10-year probability of major osteoporotic fractures (MOF), which are considered to have a greater clinical impact than other fractures. Our results suggest that, in postmenopausal women with severe osteoporosis, those treated with teriparatide had a 60% lower risk of FRAX-defined MOF compared with those treated with risedronate.

Introduction: The VERO trial was an active-controlled fracture endpoint clinical trial that enrolled postmenopausal women with severe osteoporosis.

Serum 25-hydroxy-vitamin D and the risk of fractures in the teriparatide versus risedronate VERO clinical trial.

Purpose: Using data from the 2-year, randomized, double-dummy VERO trial, we examined the changes in 25-hydroxy-vitamin D (25[OH]D) concentrations over time, and whether the fracture risk reduction of teriparatide versus risedronate varies by baseline 25(OH)D sufficiency category.

Methods: Postmenopausal women with established osteoporosis received subcutaneous daily teriparatide 20 μg or oral weekly risedronate 35 mg, with concomitant 500-1000 mg of elemental calcium and 400-800 IU/day of vitamin D supplements. Fracture endpoints were analyzed by predefined subgroups of 25(OH)D insufficient and sufficient patients.

Effects of Teriparatide Compared with Risedronate on the Risk of Fractures in Subgroups of Postmenopausal Women with Severe Osteoporosis: The VERO Trial.

The 2-year, randomized, double-blind, active-controlled fracture endpoint VERO study included postmenopausal women with established osteoporosis, who had at least 2 moderate or 1 severe baseline vertebral fractures (VFx), and bone mineral density (BMD) T-score ≤-1.5. Patients were treated with either s.

Virtual screening with support vector machines and structure kernels.

Support vector machines and kernel methods have recently gained considerable attention in chemoinformatics. They offer generally good performance for problems of supervised classification or regression, and provide a flexible and computationally efficient framework to include relevant information and prior knowledge about the data and problems to be handled. In particular, with kernel methods molecules do not need to be represented and stored explicitly as vectors or fingerprints, but only to be compared to each other through a comparison function technically called a kernel.

Identifying protein construct variants with increased crystallization propensity--a case study.

This study describes an efficient multiparallel automated workflow of cloning, expression, purification, and crystallization of a large set of construct variants for isolated protein domains aimed at structure determination by X-ray crystallography. This methodology is applied to MAPKAP kinase 2, a key enzyme in the inflammation pathway and thus an attractive drug target. The study reveals a distinct subset of truncation variants with improved crystallization properties.

Macrocyclic aminopyrimidines as multitarget CDK and VEGF-R inhibitors with potent antiproliferative activities.

X-ray structures from CDK2-aminopyrimidine inhibitor complexes led to the idea to stabilize the active conformation of aminopyrimidine inhibitors by incorporating the recognition site into a macrocyclic framework. A modular synthesis approach that relies on a new late-stage macrocyclization protocol that enables fast and efficient synthesis of macrocyclic aminopyrimidines was developed. A set of structurally diverse derivatives was prepared.

The hit-to-lead process at Schering AG: strategic aspects.

Modern organizations conducting drug-discovery programs frequently apply high-throughput screening to generate novel hit structures for the indications of interest. Systematic hit-to-lead processes have been established at most pharmaceutical companies to ensure a smooth conversion of hits into high-quality lead structures. At Schering AG, a hit-to-lead process with distinct selection criteria was introduced in 1999 to identify the best leads possible.

The target discovery process.

In order to minimise attrition rates in drug development projects, a target discovery process is implemented to select and characterise the most suitable candidate kinase targets, before lead identification and lead optimisation are embarked upon. The process consists of 1) target selection, 2) target assessment, and 3) target validation. This rational approach to target discovery, as a prerequisite for lead discovery, ensures that new therapeutic targets fulfil a set of general criteria, as well as indication-specific, descriptive and functional ones.

Classifying "kinase inhibitor-likeness" by using machine-learning methods.

By using an in-house data set of small-molecule structures, encoded by Ghose-Crippen parameters, several machine learning techniques were applied to distinguish between kinase inhibitors and other molecules with no reported activity on any protein kinase. All four approaches pursued--support-vector machines (SVM), artificial neural networks (ANN), k nearest neighbor classification with GA-optimized feature selection (GA/kNN), and recursive partitioning (RP)--proved capable of providing a reasonable discrimination. Nevertheless, substantial differences in performance among the methods were observed.

Fluorinated dihydroquinolines as potent n-NOS inhibitors.

Fluorinated dihydroquinolines showed reduced basicity of the amidine function. Their syntheses and potencies as neuronal nitric oxide synthase (n-NOS) inhibitors are reported.

Dihydroquinolines with amine-containing side chains as potent n-NOS inhibitors.

Dihydroquinolines with aminoalkyl side chains have been synthesized and have been shown to be potent n-NOS inhibitors. A marked selectivity versus e-NOS of up to approximately 300-fold was observed, whereas i-NOS was moderately inhibited.

Two syntheses of FF-MAS.

[reaction: see text] Follicular fluid-meiosis activating sterol (FF-MAS) has been shown to be an efficient inducer of meiotic maturation. It can potentially be used for improvements of in vitro fertilization techniques. Two short synthesis of FF-MAS are presented in this article.