Drug Screening in Human Cells by NMR Spectroscopy Allows the Early Assessment of Drug Potency

Structure‐based drug development is often hampered by the lack of in vivo activity of promising compounds screened in vitro, due to low membrane permeability or poor intracellular binding selectivity. Herein, we show that ligand screening can be performed in living human cells by “intracellular protein‐observed” NMR spectroscopy, without requiring enzymatic activity measurements or other cellular assays. Quantitative binding information is obtained by fast, inexpensive ¹H NMR experiments, providing intracellular dose‐ and time‐dependent ligand binding curves, from which kinetic and thermodynamic parameters linked to cell permeability and binding affinity and selectivity are obtained. The approach was applied to carbonic anhydrase and, in principle, can be extended to any NMR‐observable intracellular target. The results obtained are directly related to the potency of candidate drugs, that is, the required dose. The application of this approach at an early stage of the drug design pipeline could greatly increase the low success rate of modern drug development.     

Noise Reduction in Spur Gear Systems

This article lists some tips for reducing gear case noise. With this aim, a static analysis was carried out in order to describe how stresses resulting from meshing gears affect the acoustic emissions. Different parameters were taken into account, such as the friction, material, and lubrication, in order to validate ideas from the literature and to make several comparisons. Furthermore, a coupled Eulerian–Lagrangian (CEL) analysis was performed, which was an innovative way of evaluating the sound pressure level of the aforementioned gears. Different parameters were considered again, such as the friction, lubrication, material, and rotational speed, in order to make different research comparisons. The analytical results agreed with those in the literature, both for the static analysis and CEL analysis—for example, it was shown that changing the material from steel to ductile iron improved the gear noise, while increasing the rotational speed or the friction increased the acoustic emissions. Regarding the CEL analysis, air was considered a perfect gas, but its viscosity or another state equation could have also been taken into account. Therefore, the above allowed us to state that research into these scientific fields will bring about reliable results.     

Equazioni quasi ellittiche e spaziL p, θ (ω, δ) (I)

Summary Regularity theorems inL ^{2, θ} (ω, δ) spaces are proved for weak solutions of quasielliptic differential equations. In particular, regularization results are obtained in the class of holder continuous functions (with respect to a suitable metric related to the operator). As a consequence, we obtain results and estimates in L^p andL ^{p, θ} spaces for the solution of the Dirichlet problem.

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Lavoro eseguito nell’ambito del Gruppo di Ricerca n^o 46 del Comitato per la Matematica del C N.R.     

Time irregularity of generalized Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes

This Note is concerned with the properties of solutions to a linear evolution equation perturbed by a cylindrical Lévy process. It turns out that solutions, under rather weak requirements, do not have a càdlàg modification. Some natural open questions are also stated.