Qiong Gu

Anti-influenza agents from Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Covering: up to 2010 After new human transmissible H1N1 (swine flu) viruses were reported in Mexico and the United States in April 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the emergence of a novel influenza A virus. Most governments in the world have been alerted and are monitoring the situation closely. As one of the official responses to the H1N1 pandemic, the Chinese government has released three editions of a document entitled “Recommended Schemes for Pandemic Influenza A Diagnoses and Treatments”. The third edition recommended the use of not only two targeted anti-flu drugs, oseltamivir and zanamivir, but also four anti-flu TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) prescriptions. Since then, TCM has played a significant role in fighting the pandemic. TCM drugs comprise multiple compounds regulating multiple targets for a given class of medical indications, and are tunable to the symptoms of the individual. This review summarizes anti-influenza agents from TCM, including compounds, herbs, and TCM prescriptions, and suggests that, by further investigating TCM theory and mining TCM databases, a better drug discovery paradigm may arise – one that can be beneficial to both TCM and modern medicine.

Three-dimensional pharmacophore modeling of liver-X receptor agonists.

High cholesterol levels contribute to hyperlipidemia. Liver X receptors (LXRs) are the drug targets. LXRs regulate the cholesterol absorption, biosynthesis, transportation, and metabolism. Novel agonists of LXR, especially LXRβ, are attractive solutions for treating hyperlipidemia. In order to discover novel LXRβ agonists, a three-dimensional pharmacophore model was built based upon known LXRβ agonists. The model was validated with a test set, a virtual screening experiment, and the FlexX docking approach. Results show that the model is capable of predicting a LXRβ agonist activity. Ligand-based virtual screening results can be refined by cross-linking by structure-based approaches. This is because two ligands that are mapped in the same way to the same pharmacophore model may have significantly different binding behaviors in the receptors binding pocket. This paper reports our approach to identify reliable pharmacophore models through combining both ligand- and structure-based approaches.

Salvianolic acid A, a polyphenolic derivative from Salvia miltiorrhiza bunge, as a multifunctional agent for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease.

The effects of Salvianolic acid A (Sal A) on the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) were investigated. Sal A significantly inhibits amyloid beta

Synthesis and characterization of 1H-phenanthro[9,10-d]imidazole derivatives as multifunctional agents for treatment of Alzheimer's disease.

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On the Value of Homology Models for Virtual Screening: Discovering hCXCR3 Antagonists by Pharmacophore-Based and Structure-Based Approaches

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SC-514, a selective inhibitor of IKKβ attenuates RANKL-induced osteoclastogenesis and NF-κB activation

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