Current Drug Targets - Volume 24, Issue 17, 2023

Rheumatoid arthritis is an untreatable autoimmune disorder. The disease is accompanied by joint impairment and anomalies, which negatively affect the patient’s quality of life and contribute to a decline in manpower. To diagnose and treat rheumatoid arthritis, it is crucial to understand the abnormal signaling pathways that contribute to the disease. This understanding will help develop new rheumatoid arthritis-related intervention targets. Over the last few decades, researchers have given more attention to rheumatoid arthritis. The current review seeks to provide a detailed summary of rheumatoid arthritis, highlighting the basic description of the disease, past occurrences, the study of epidemiology, risk elements, and the process of disease progression, as well as the key scientific development of the disease condition and multiple signaling pathways and enumerating the most current advancements in discovering new rheumatoid arthritis signaling pathways and rheumatoid arthritis inhibitors. This review emphasizes the anti-rheumatoid effects of these inhibitors [for the Wnt/β-catenin, Phosphoinositide 3-Kinases (PI3K/AKT), Spleen Tyrosine Kinase (SYK), and Granulocyte-Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor (GM-CSF) signaling pathways], illustrating their mechanism of action through a literature search, current therapies, and novel drugs under pre-clinical and clinical trials.

Dengue fever has become a major public health concern. It is usually related to intravascular leaking, bleeding disorders, and thrombocytopenia and is recognized as a potent threat to humans. The scarcity of anti-dengue medication or vaccine for such a serious disease leads to an upsurge in the usage of traditional medicines for its proper management. India has diverse biodiversity and a long history of using plant-based remedies. Several medicinal plant extracts have been studied for producing anti-dengue viral activity. AYUSH traditional systems provide a plethora of plants that have been reported to be useful in the treatment of fever. Single and compound plant- based formulations in natural form have been used in Unani holistic approaches. This review serves as a new approach to illustrate the most recent evidence regarding the antiviral activity of various plants by providing scientific proof and also to validate the traditional formulations as effective treatments in dengue fever for global acceptance.

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is one the most lethal malignancies worldwide affecting around half a million individuals each year. The treatment of PC is relatively difficult due to the difficulty in making an early diagnosis. Transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β) is a multifunctional factor acting as both a tumor promoter in early cancer stages and a tumor suppressor in advanced disease. Programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) is a ligand of programmed death-1 (PD-1), an immune checkpoint receptor, allowing tumor cells to avoid elimination by immune cells. Recently, targeting the TGF-β signaling and PD-L1 pathways has emerged as a strategy for cancer therapy. In this review, we have summarized the current knowledge regarding these pathways and their contribution to tumor development with a focus on PC. Moreover, we have reviewed the role of TGF-β and PD-L1 blockade in the treatment of various cancer types, including PC, and discussed the clinical trials evaluating TGF-β and PD-L1 antagonists in PC patients.

G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are among the largest family of cell surface receptors found in the human genome. They govern a wide range of physiological responses in both health and diseases, making them one of the potential targeted surface receptors for pharmaceuticals. Flavonoids can modulate GPCRs activity by acting as allosteric ligands. They can either enhance or reduce the GPCR's effect. Emerging research shows that individual flavonoids or mixtures of flavonoids from plant extracts can have relevant pharmacological effects against a number of diseases, particularly by influencing GPCRs. In the present review, we are considering to give a comprehensive overview of flavonoids and related compounds that exhibit GPCRs activity and to further explore which beneficial structural features. Molecular docking was used to strengthen experimental evidence and describe flavonoid-GPCRs interactions at molecular level.