Ernst M. Jucker – författare

This second volume of PDR SPECIAL TOPICS contains five review articles dealing with fungal diseases in humans as well as therapeutic approaches. The first chapter gives an account of the various growth forms of pathogenic fungi and classifies them based on their sexual cycle and on their RNA/DNA patterns. The second chapter describes the clinical manifestations of human fungal infections, their prevalence and epidemiology. The third chapter is devoted to diverse laboratory methods in the field of diagnosis of fungal infections, and the fourth and main chapter presents a complete overview of current antifungal therapy. The increase in fungal infections and the improvement of therapeutic options leading to a demand for reliable antifungal susceptibility testing is the topic of the closing chapter. The volume aims at the practitioner who wants to be abreast of the latest achievements in this field and advanced students who wish to further their studies in this important domain.

In the treatment of infections caused by rapidly mutating viruses like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), combination therapy with multiple drugs act- ing by different mechanisms offers several advantages over monotherapy. It may provide: synergistic effect, possible reduction of dosages and side-effects, and reduction of the chance of drug resistance. In the past few years, hun- dreds of HIV protease inhibitors have been synthesized and tested in order to overcome the limitations of reverse transcriptase inhibitors like zidovudine and others. In this review, emphasis is placed on the development of HIV pro- tease inhibitors as antiviral agents against HIY, and structure-activity rela- tionship analysis of saquinavir and related compounds. Limitations of some protease inhibitors and ways to overcome the shortcomings are presented. Among these many protease inhibitors five have been marketed during 1995-1999. They are saquinavir, ritonavir, indinavir, nelfinavir and ampre- navir. Their different structural features, important physicochemical, phar- macokinetic and clinical profiles are presented in a table form for easy com- parison.It is hoped that in the future new drugs based on additional mech- anisms can be developed for the treatment of AIDS. Contents 4 1 Introduction ...HIV protease as a target for chemotherapy ...2 5 Design of protease inhibitors ...3 5 Basis of rational design of HIV protease inhibitors ...3.1 5 New development of HIV protease inhibitors ...6 3.2 HIV protease inhibitors on the market ...20 4 20 4.1 SAR of saquinavir and related compounds ...

Jay A. Glasel: Drugs, the human genome, and individual-based medicine.- Vera M. Kolb: Herbal medicine of Wisconsin Indians.- Paul L. Skatrud: The impact of multiple drug resistance (MDR) proteins on chemotherapy and drug discovery.- John W. Ford, Edward B. Stevens, J. Mark Treherne, Jeremy Packer and Mark Bushfield: Potassium channels: Gene family, therapeutic relevance, high-throughput screening technologies and drug discovery.- David T. Wong and Frank P. Bymaster: Dual serotonin and noradrenaline uptake inhibitor class of antidepressants - Potential for greater efficacy of just hype?.- Satya P. Gupta: Advances in QSAR studies of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase inhibitors