Effective Drug Therapies from Functional,Macromolecular Building Blocks with a Biomimetic Design

Summary: The development of suitable delivery systems for intracellular delivery of proteins, peptides and other bioactive materials opens the possibility to establish refined strategies for small drug delivery, gene delivery and vaccination. We present the assembly of advanced drug delivery systems from tailored building blocks to scaffolds and bioactive cargos to afford targeting and transport across biological barriers. In particular, the utilization of novel molecular transporter will advance the bioavailability of small and macromolecular drugs that show targeted intracellular delivery.     

Stereoselective synthesis of constrained norbornane-derived spiro-β-lactams

New enantiopure polycyclic norbornane-derived spiro-β-lactams were synthesized by means of a Staudinger ketene–imine reaction between unsymmetrical bicyclic chiral ketenes, generated from differently substituted norbornane carboxylic acids, and (E)-N-benzyl-N-(phenylmethylene)amine, with high yields and moderate to good stereoselectivities. The diastereoisomeric results were rationalized taking into account the increasing steric encumbrance present on the norbornane skeleton and the stability of the products. The configurations of the newly formed stereocenters of spiro-β-lactams were assigned on the basis of 2D NMR experiments and X-ray analysis. Spiro-β-lactams were subjected to acid hydrolysis obtaining the corresponding norbornane-derived β-amino acids.     

DISTRIBUTION OF DI-SULFONATED ALUMINUM PHTHALOCYANINE AND PHOTOFRIN II IN LIVING CELLS: A COMPARATIVE FLUOROMETRIC STUDY

Microspectrofluorometric and fluorescence imaging techniques have been employed to study the internalization and intracellular distribution of both Photofrin II, an experimental drug used in photodynamic therapy, and di-sulfonated aluminum phthalocyanine, a very promising photosensitizer. The results obtained by microscopic techniques in living cells have been compared with those obtained in solution on cell extracts. Experimental results indicated that the complexity of the drug-cell interaction can be explained according to the chemico-physical nature of the drugs. In particular, the presence of both monomeric and aggregated fractions, which are supposed to be internalized through different mechanisms, accounts for the intracellular distributions observed for both drugs, depending on the treatment conditions. Equilibria among the drug fractions take place within the cells, resulting in the persistence of the intracellular fluorescence. On the whole, the behavior of the two drugs appears very similar, except for some aspects related to the intracellular distribution, which can be explained in terms of different degree of lipophilicity of the drugs.     

Minimising makespan in the two-machine flow-shop with release times

This paper considers the two-machine flow-shop problem with the objective of minimising the makespan subject to different release times. In view of the strongly NP-hard nature of this problem, five lower bounds and two new dominance criteria are proposed together with a decomposition procedure that reduces the problem size by setting jobs at the beginning of the sequence. Several branch and bound procedures are described by applying different lower bounds and branching schemes. A detailed computational campaign has been performed on different kinds of instances testing problems with size up to 200 jobs.     

An improved approach for the determination of plasma-free catecholamines by HPLC-ED: Application to normal and hypertensive patients

Summary A dual-step procedure for the rapid, quantitative isolation of free catecholamines (norepinephrine, epinephrine and dopamine) from plasma, using a little column of CM-Sephadex and alumina adsorption, is described. Sensitive high performance liquid chromatography is also discussed, employing an amperometric detector for the quantitative determination. The recovery of the three catecholamines, and of N-methyldopamine used as the internal standard, was about 70–80%; the detection limits were 2pg for norepinephrine, 3pg for epinephrine and 3pg for dopamine. The combination of the rather specific and easy to handle two-step sample clean-up procedure, the high resolving power of the chromatography and the high sensitivity of electrochemical detection provided a simple method for the determination of free catecholamines in plasma samples of normal and essential hypertensive subjects under different conditions (supine position for 45 min, standing for 5 and 10 min). It was found that a significant increase in epinephrine levels (P<0.01) occurred in hypertensive patients under the three conditions studied.     

Determination of the protonic transference number for KH2PO4 by electromotive force measurements

The protonic transference number (t_H⁺) of KH₂PO₄ has been determined at 293 K as a function of hydrogen partial pressure (1>p_H2(atm)>10^-3) using EMF measurements. The results are consistent with earlier work which indicated that t_H⁺ is essentially unity (>0.97) for this material under the relevant experimental conditions.     

Light-harvesting and structural organization of Photosystem II: from individual complexes to thylakoid membrane

Photosystem II (PSII) is responsible for the water oxidation in photosynthesis and it consists of many proteins and pigment-protein complexes in a variable composition, depending on environmental conditions. Sunlight-induced charge separation lies at the basis of the photochemical reactions and it occurs in the reaction center (RC). The RC is located in the PSII core which also contains light-harvesting complexes CP43 and CP47. The PSII core of plants is surrounded by external light-harvesting complexes (lhcs) forming supercomplexes, which together with additional external lhcs, are located in the thylakoid membrane where they perform their functions. In this paper we provide an overview of the available information on the structure and organization of pigment-protein complexes in PSII and relate this to experimental and theoretical results on excitation energy transfer (EET) and charge separation (CS). This is done for different subcomplexes, supercomplexes, PSII membranes and thylakoid membranes. Differences in experimental and theoretical results are discussed and the question is addressed how results and models for individual complexes relate to the results on larger systems. It is shown that it is still very difficult to combine all available results into one comprehensive picture.     

Active methylene compounds in a very effective approach to 3-substituted isobenzofuranones through tandem aldol/lactonization reactions

In this article we describe a new accessible methodology for the synthesis of isobenzofuran-1(3H)-ones. In this process we exploited an effective, economic, useful and environmentally benign K₂CO₃ catalyzed, solvent-free one-pot tandem aldol-lactonization reaction between active methylene compounds and methyl 2-carboxy benzaldehyde. A particularly simple work-up and purification procedure are additional advantages addressed to a general green chemistry approach to this important class of heterocyclic compounds.     

Improved worst-case complexity for the MIN 3-SET COVERING problem

We consider MIN SET COVERING when the subsets are constrained to have maximum cardinality 3. We propose an exact algorithm whose worst-case complexity is bounded above by O^*(1.3957^m), where m is the number of sets in the instance. This result improves upon the previously known bound of O^*(1.4391^m).