Trends in pharmacological sciences
-
Trends Pharmacol. Sci. · Sep 2004
Review Historical ArticleTechniques: Bioprospecting historical herbal texts by hunting for new leads in old tomes.
Ethnobotany has led to the identification of novel pharmacological agents but many challenges to using ethnobotany as a research tool remain. In particular, the loss of traditional knowledge together with the advent of high-throughput screening has made ethnobotanical techniques laborious and potentially unnecessary. ⋯ The methodology for extracting useful information contained within these resources had been cumbersome and consuming. However, the application of new bioinformatics data-mining systems to herbal texts holds great promise for identifying novel pharmacotherapeutic leads for bioactive compounds.
-
Trends Pharmacol. Sci. · Dec 2003
ReviewOpioid hyperalgesia and tolerance versus 5-HT1A receptor-mediated inverse tolerance.
In addition to analgesia, opioids also produce paradoxical hyperalgesic effects following acute and chronic treatment. In this article, we review the occurrence of this hyperalgesia under several conditions, and discuss the potential mechanisms and clinical implications. We also review recent evidence that paradoxical analgesia and inverse tolerance induced by stimulation of 5-HT(1A) receptors, which is a mirror image of opioid-induced hyperalgesia and tolerance, might achieve clinically significant analgesia in chronic pain.