Trends in Pharmaceutical Sciences
Volume:3 Issue: 4, Dec 2017

Dementia and Alzheimer’s, the common cause of this syndrome, have been given special considerations to be managed by natural medicaments. Parallel to conventional medications for dementia and Alzheimer, there are various remedies in pharmaceutical manuscripts of Persian medicine. This review provides various compound formulations to manage and control the sign, symptoms and complications of memory loss, Alzheimer’s and allied disorders. These remedies have been cited in a series of traditional pharmaceutical manuscripts of Persian medicine, namely Qarābādin or prescription. With a view to the positive pharmacological or biological activities of the constituents of filtered formulations, many of those can be reformulated, and either experimentally or clinically evaluated in order to be introduced as new natural remedies in this field.

Suicide gene therapy is based on transfer of a suicide viral or a bacterial gene into tumor cells. Expression of these genes leads to non-toxic substances in cell convert to lethal chemotherapeutic agents. However this approach to gene therapy has been widely welcomed by gene researchers and successfully used in many in-vivo and in-vitro researches, but in the case of human clinical trials, the results were not repeated and  hadn’t appropriate clinical consequence. Nevertheless, current studies on preclinical models of cancer revealed that suicide gene therapy has the high potential when have been used in combination with novel therapeutic strategies. This review article summarized the various types of suicide gene strategies as well particular highlighting the recently developed suicide gene therapy in humans and their adverse effects. Moreover, the diverse systems which have been used along with suicide gene therapy were reviewed. Finally, this article provides some perspectives into the future of this approach, particularly for eradication of tumor stem cells.

Iron based nanoparticles are one of the most applicable and studied nanostructures in various sciences and technologies. These nanoparticles are also introduced to the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences due to their unique physicochemical properties such as super par magnetism, ease of synthesis, and biocompatibility. Several techniques are now developed and available for the preparation of iron based nanoparticles. Including chemical synthesis and biological synthesis which can be divided into microbial synthesis and plant mediated synthesis. Coprecipitation reaction is introduced as the main chemical method for the synthesis of magnetite nanoparticles as one of the most applied iron nanoparticle. The main approaches in biosynthesis of iron nanoparticles are also reviewed as microbial and plant mediated synthesis. In this mini review we are going to have an over view upon the main approaches for the synthesis of iron nanoparticles.

Nutrient components in the culture medium can affect not only the growth and metabolic activity of bacteria, but also bacterial attachment to solid surfaces. Based on the fact that response surface methodology (RSM) has been successfully applied for the optimization of Menaquinone-7 (MK-7) production. The objective of this research was to investigate the feasibility of reducing biofilm formation with added nutrient components to the optimum medium previously described for MK-7 production without compromising MK-7 production. Monovalent and divalent salts and urea which were suspected to have an impact on bacterial biofilms were screened using a full factorial design.  Calcium chloride and urea were found to significantly influence the biofilm biomass and MK-7 production (p < 0.05). Central composite face design (CCF) was used for the optimization. The minimum biofilm biomass of 0.56g and MK-7 concentration of 17.98mg/L was achieved at the optimum conditions. This is the first report on biofilm reduction in the MK-7 production process through optimization of nutrient components.

The xenobiotics-induced liver injury is a major clinical complication. Hence, finding hepatoprotective agents could have clinical value. Herbal medicines are a major source of biologically active chemicals which could be applied as hepatoprotective agents. The current study was designed to assess the hepatoprotective properties of Avicennia Marina (AM) extract and its different fractions. In vivo, the hepatoprotective effect of AM total extract against CCl4-induced acute liver injury was evaluated in rats, and a series of histopathological, biochemical, and oxidative stress parameters were monitored. In vitro, the protective effect of AM extract fractions (Petroleum ether, Chloroform, Ethyl acetate, and Ethanol) was evaluated on human liver hepatoma cells (HepG2). Severe elevation in serum level of liver injury biomarkers, along with liver tissue histopathological changes, lipid peroxidation, and liver tissue glutathione depletion were detected in CCl4-treated rats. On the other hand, CCl4-induced toxicity was evident in vitro by significant cell death. It was found that AM extract provided significant protection against CCL4 toxicity in vivo by decreasing serum biomarkers of liver injury and tissue markers of oxidative stress. In vitro, the protective effect of AM extract fractions (Chloroform, Ethyl acetate, and Ethanol) was evident as these fractions significantly decreased CCl4 cytotoxicity. As AM extract exhibited significant suppression of oxidative stress markers, its antioxidant effect could play a significant role in its hepatoprotective properties.

Paclitaxel is a potent anticancer drug with a unique mechanism of action, which is now administered via IV infusion. Due to the presence of cremophor EL in its formulation it may show anaphylactic reactions. So that oral administration of paclitaxel for removal of these important side effects is the interest of many researches. Intestinal permeation of paclitaxel is restricted because of low solubility, lack of intestinal permeability, and efflux by pumps in intestinal wall. In this study the effects of NSAIDs and P-glycoprotein inhibitors on the intestinal permeability of paclitaxel was assessed by everted intestinal sacs technique. The results show that piroxicam, indomethacin, naproxen, mefenamic acid, and ibuprofen increase the intestinal permeability of paclitaxel 15.5, 10.1, 7.5, 5.6 , and 4.5 folds, respectively. Inhibition of the P-gp pumps by verapamil and cyclosporine increase the permeation of paclitaxel 2.9 and 4 folds, respectively. It seems that co-administration of paclitaxel with NSAIDs and P-gp pumps inhibitors could improve the intestinal permeation of paclitaxel.

Due to limited water solubility of cyproterone acetate and also limited skin permeation; lipid base nanocarriers with different size ranges were considered for topical delivery of cyproterone acetate. Lipid nanoparticles were prepared by solvent diffusion evaporation technique. Different variables including; surfactant/lipid ratio, mixing rate and addition time of organic phase to aqueous phase were utilized in optimization process in order to fabricate nanoparticle at specified particle size ranges to target the particle to hair follicles. Statistical data showed that the model is significant (p-value of 0.0001) to prepare lipid based nanoparticle having specified size ranges. The results showed that there is interaction between different parameters and 3-D graphs indicated the optimum point of interactions between various parameters. Drug entrapment efficiency was 99.03% and loading capacity was 1.91%. Release studies showed that 50- 75% of drug will be releasable from the nanoparticles within the first 24 hours depend on the size range of the nanoparticles. The R-square value of 0.9839 indicated that there is a good relationship between experimental data and the fitted models suggested by Design-Expert software. Cyproterone acetate release from these lipid-based nanoparticles, was significantly slower than the permeation of the free drug from dialysis tubing, which confirm that this delivery system is capable to control the release rate of the cyproterone acetate. Drug release pattern from nanoparticles was best fitted to Higuchi model which is a suitable model for matrix based delivery systems.

Graphene oxide (nGO) is considred as a good nano carrier for enzymes to protect them in biological media against proteolytic activity and extend their activity and stability. In this paper, we reported a new inexpensive collagenase assay using graphene oxide nanosheets (nGO) for Coomassie brilliant blue (CBB) staining. Collagenase enzymes was attached to nGO and added to microwells containing dried collagen that covered bottom of wells. The optical absorption (590nm) was linearly increased parallel to increasing the concentration of collagen. The concentraton of collagenase enzyme can be measured by this assay after staining with CBB after overnight incubation with collagen. This technique is a simple, safe, inexpensive and relatively fast method for evaluation of collagenase enzyme and could be applicable for pharmaceutical and industrial purposes.