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The authors investigate the ability of machine learning models to developing new drug-like molecules by learning desired chemical properties versus simply generating molecules that similar to those in the training set.

The global mental health crisis has led to increased substance abuse among youth. Prescription drug abuse causes approximately 115 American deaths daily. Understanding intergenerational transmission of substance abuse is complex due to lengthy human studies and socioeconomic variables. Recent FDA guidelines mandate abuse liability testing for neuro-active drugs but overlook intergenerational transfer. Brown planaria, due to their nervous system development similarities with mammals, offer a novel model.

Staphylococcus aureus is a major pathogen in both hospitals and the community and can cause systemic infections such as pneumonia. Multi-drug resistant strains, such as Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) are particularly worrisome. In order to reduce the development of bacterial resistance, we hypothesized that two selected traditional Chinese medicines, Shuang-Huang-Lian (SHL) and Lan-Qin, would be effective against S. aureus. The results showed that SHL had a synergistic effect with gentamicin as well as additive effects with penicillin and cefazolin against S. aureus compared with using antibiotics alone.

Here, the authors chose to investigate the efficacy of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) and cisplatin or zinc ions in inducing cancer apoptosis. While both treatments were found to reduce the proliferation of lung cancer cells, the authors suggest that further studies to identify the mechanism are necessary.

In this study, the authors use high-throughput virtual screening to design and evaluate a set of non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors for binding affinity to the protein reverse transcriptase. These studies have important applications toward HIV therapies.

The major drawback of chemotherapy regimens for treating cancer is that the cancerous cells acquire drug resistance and become impervious to further dose escalation. Keeping in mind the studied success of herbal formulations with regard to alternative treatments for cancer, we hypothesized that the use of a chemotherapeutic drug and proprietary herbal formulation, HF1, would combat this phenomenon when administered with common chemotherapeutic drug 5FU. Results demonstrated a cooperative effect between HF1 and 5FU on the drug resistant cell line, implying that administration of HF1 with 5FU results in cell death as measured by MTT assay.

Some cancer treatments lose efficacy when combined with treatments for excessive stomach acid, due to the changes in the stomach environment caused by the stomach acid treatments. Lin and Lin investigate information on oral cancer drugs to see what information is available on interactions of these drugs.

The authors looked at whether youth use of marijuana related to later high-risk drug use. Using survey data from 2010-2019 they found that youth marijuana use did correlate to an increased risk of high-risk drug use.

The authors test potential anti-inflammatory and pro-apoptotic effects of a polyherbal extract formulation on cultured breast cancer cells.

Enzyme chemotaxis is a thermodynamic phenomenon in which enzymes move along a substrate concentration gradient towards regions with higher substrate concentrations and can be used to steer nanovehicles towards targets along natural substrate concentrations. In patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a gradient of tau protein forms in the bloodstream. Tau protein is a substrate of the enzyme CDK5, which catalyzes the phosphorylation of tau protein and can travel using chemotaxis along tau protein gradients to increasing concentrations of tau and amyloid-beta proteins. The authors hypothesized that CDK5 would be able to overcome these barriers of Brownian motion and developed a quantitative model using Michaelis-Menten kinetics to define the necessary parameters to confirm and characterize CDK5’s chemotactic behavior to establish its utility in drug delivery and other applications.