Human Targets

Victor Rios has a vibrant reputation as America s leading ethnographer of Latino youth. His personal storygoing from drug pusher (selling heroin on the streets as a teenager) to a hard worker at a mechanic shop within a matter of weeksshows how he stands in the place of the Latino youths he studies. His story underscores the degree to which delinquent urban youths can become adaptable, fluid, amenable individuals, able to shift their views of the world as well as their actions. Rios rejects the old storyline that said gangs are bad and they do bad things because they are bad people. Kids on the street, he argues, can drift between different identities, indeed, they can shift seamlessly between responsible and deviant displays within a few hours time. The key to understanding gang-associated youth lies in analysis of the way authority figures (teachers and police officers) interact with young people. The kids need caring adults who offer tangible resources. Story and characters are always front-and-center in Rios s narrative: Jorge, Mark, Wilson, and others, are boys we get to know as they negotiate day-to-day life on the streets and across institutional settings. We learn a great deal about Cholo subculture, the clothing and hairstyles, and the argot that are adopted by Latino youth in response to the forces that seek to marginalize or punish them. The crisis of a perceived epidemic of police brutality in our post-Ferguson era is a product of culture in Rios s view: contested symbols, negative interactions, and day-to-day encounters that freeze youth identities as gang-associated, and that freeze authority identities as negative shapers of youth attitudes and actions are the dynamic. Fear of young males of color leads to police misreading and dehumanizing of young black and Latino men. Rios raises our awareness of how this dynamic operates by studying his subjects whole: following young gang members into their schools, their homes, their community organizations, their detention facilities, and watching them interact with police, watching them grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets. Get killed. This book will be a landmark contribution to the social psychology of poverty and crime."

The identification of drug targets in a given disease has been central to pharmaceutical research from the latter half of the 20th century right up to the modern genomics era. Human Drug Targets provides an essential guide to one of the most important aspects of drug discovery – the identification of suitable protein and RNA targets prior to the creation of drug development candidates. The first part of the book consists of introductory chapters that provide the background to drug target discovery and highlight the way in which these targets have been organised into online databases. It also includes a user’s guide to the list of entries that forms the bulk of the book. Since this is not designed to be a compendium of drugs, the emphasis will be on the known (or speculated) biological role of the targets and not on the issues associated with pharmaceutical development. The objective is to provide just enough information to be informative and prompt further searches, while keeping the amount of text for each of the many entries to a minimum. Human Drug Targets will prove invaluable to those drug discovery professionals, in both industry and academia, who need to make some sense of the bewildering array of online information sources on current and potential human drug targets. As well as creating order out of a complex target landscape, the book will act as an ideas generator for potentially novel targets that might form the basis of future discovery projects.

A large number of publications have described impaired angiogenesis and vasculogenesis present in the feto-placental circulation after pregnancy diseases such as pre-eclamptic pregnancies, gestational diabetes, and intrauterine growth restriction, among others. Results suggest impaired secretion and activity of pro-angiogenic factors such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), interleukin 8 (IL-8), adenosine and nitric oxide, associates with compromised secretion and activity of anti-angiogenic factors such as soluble receptor of VEGF (sFlt-1), thrombospondin 2, endostatin among others. More recent evidences include the participation of endothelial progenitor cells (EPC), which circulating number is reduced infeto-placental circulation in pregnancies such as pre-eclampsia. Despite this knowledge, therapies for placental angiogenesis recovery during pathological pregnancies are far to be tested. However, from the cardiovascular field, it has been described the administration of EPC, alone or used as gene-transfer therapy; or it has been described the potential role of statins (HMGCoA inhibitors), or angiotensin-converter enzyme (ACE) inhibitors for enhancing angiogenesis. Finally, feto-placental tissue is an exceptional source of progenitor and stem cells, which could be used for treated other human diseases such as stroke, myocardial infarction, hypertension, or even cancer. In this research topic, authors highlight physiopatological and clinical importance of the impaired placental angiogenesis, and suggest potential targets for developing innovative therapies.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "MicroRNAs: Novel Biomarkers and Therapeutic Targets for Human Cancers" that was published in JCM

As opposed to other books on the topic, this volume is unique in also covering emerging transporter targets. Following a general introduction to the importance of targeting transporter proteins with drugs, the book systematically presents individual transporter classes and explains their pharmacology and physiology. The text covers all transporter families with known or suspected importance as drug targets, including neurotransmitter transporters, ABC transporters, glucose transporters and organic ion transporters. The final part discusses recent advances in structural studies of transport proteins, assay methods for transport activity, and the systems biology of transporters and their regulation. With its focus on drug development issues, this authoritative overview is required reading for researchers in industry and academia targeting transport proteins for the treatment of disease.

In Targets for Cancer Chemotherapy: Transcription Factors and Other Nuclear Proteins, a panel of leading basic researchers, pharmaceutical scientists, and clinical oncologists explain in detail the therapeutically-relevant protein targets that contribute to cancer pathology and spell out their implications for cancer drug discovery and clinical application. The authors identify and illuminate selected transcription factor oncoproteins and tumor suppressors, together with nuclear proteins that are central to the phenotype of the tumor cell involved in chromatin control. The emphasis is on new targets and approaches to cancer treatment derived from the cancer cell cycle, gene control targets, and angiogenesis.