Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the causative agent in cervical cancer. HPV oncogenes are major drivers of the transformed phenotype, and the cancers remain addicted to these oncogenes. A screen of the human kinome has identified inhibition of Aurora kinase A (AURKA) as being synthetically lethal on the background of HPV E7 expression. The investigational AURKA inhibitor MLN8237/Alisertib selectively promoted apoptosis in the HPV cancers. The apoptosis was driven by an extended mitotic delay in the Alisertib-treated HPV E7-expressing cells. This had the effect of reducing Mcl-1 levels, which is destabilized in mitosis, and increasing BIM levels, normally destabilized by Aurora A in mitosis. Overexpression of Mcl-1 reduced sensitivity to the drug.The level of HPV E7 expression influenced the extent of Alisertibinduced mitotic delay and Mcl-1 reduction. Xenograft experiments with three cervical cancer cell lines showed Alisertib inhibited growth of HPV and non-HPV xenografts during treatment. Growth of non-HPV tumors was delayed, but in two separate HPV cancer cell lines, regression with no resumption of growth was detected, even at 50 days after treatment. A transgenic model of premalignant disease driven solely by HPV E7 also demonstrated sensitivity to drug treatment. Here, we show for the first time that targeting of the Aurora A kinase in mice using drugs such as Alisertib results in a curative sterilizing therapy that may be useful in treating HPV-driven cancers.

The process of drug discovery is challenging and a costly affair. It takes about 12 to 15 years and costs over $1 billion dollars to develop a new drug and introduce the finished product in the market. With the increase in diseases, virus spread, and patients, it has become essential to invent new medicines. Consequently, today researchers are becoming interested in inventing new medicines faster by adopting higher throughput screening methods. One avenue of approach to discovering drugs faster is the High-Throughput Screening (HTS) method, which has gained a lot of attention in the previous few years. Today, High-Throughput Screening (HTS) has become a standard method for discovering drugs in various pharmaceutical industries. This review focuses on the advancement of technologies in High-Throughput Screening (HTS) methods, namely fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), biochemical assay, fluorescence polarization (FP), homogeneous time resolved fluorescence (HTRF), Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), Fluorescence intensity distribution analysis (FIDA), Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and research advances in three major technology areas including miniaturization, automation and robotics, and artificial intelligence, which promises to help speed up the discovery of medicines and its development process.

Zika flavivirus is suspected to cause Guillain-Barre syndrome in adults and microcephaly, along with other congenital abnormalities in infants. Presently, no vaccines or therapeutics are available. Here, we report novel compounds identified by high-throughput virtual screening of Maybridge chemical database and molecular docking studies. We selected viral enzyme NS2B/NS3 serine protease as the therapeutic target because of its important role in viral replication. We selected seven potential compounds as antiviral drug candidates because of their high GOLD fitness score, high AutoDock Vina score, or X-Score binding energy and analyzed the strength of molecular interactions between the active site amino acids and selected compounds. Our study also provides a foundation for similar studies for the search of novel therapeutics against Zika virus.

Vitamin D is a hot topic that has attracted attention over the past 10 years, especially since a large proportion of people suffer from this nutrient deficiency. Vitamin D deficiency is estimated to be about 1 billion people all over the world and 50% in Asia and the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has also demonstrated a high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency among healthy Saudi individuals. This chapter provides, in detail, a clear and understandable identification of vitamin D, its function, source, synthesis, metabolism, status, and deficiency. The chapter also focuses on studying vitamin D deficiency in Saudi Arabia based on PubMed's initial research criteria.