National projects

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease characterized by a progressive degeneration of the dopaminergic projection between the substantia nigra compacta (SNc) and the striatum with associated movement impairments. It represents a very important health issue, as there is no cure for this devastating disease. Although the eth...

Memory and cognitive deficits of patients with AD are the result of severely decreased brain levels of ACh. Currently approved ChEs inhibitors in AD therapy (donepezil, galantamine and rivastigmine) alleviate symptoms of the disease by increasing brain levels of ACh. They achieve this by preventing the breakdown of ACh through inhibition of the enzymes that hydrolyz...

Cancer remains an important cause of mortality and economic losses worldwide. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) is among the 10 most-frequent forms of cancer in the EU and have the bad prognosis with the current therapeutic options. NHLs are a very heterogeneous group of disorders that comprise some very aggressive subtypes, with no standard for therapy. Even for individua...

Currently, our world is facing an acute shortage of novel vaccine adjuvants. Adjuvants enhance the immunogenicity of vaccines, therefore they constitute essential components of vaccines. They are needed not only to increase the magnitude of the response but also to guide the type of response to produce the most effective type of immunity against distinct pathogens/t...

Nowadays, we are in a transition era where it is evident that therapy of bacterial infections is not a trivial task, understood by modern medicine and supplied with abundant medicines. Emergence of bacterial resistance, globalisation and access to modern medicinal practice together with a decreasing output of antibacterial discovery pipeline, projects a major concer...

The ageing of the population has resulted in an increase in the number of people with age-related diseases such as dementia. With more than 35 million people affected worldwide, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most prominent form of senile dementia. The number of patients afflicted with this progressive neurodegenerative disorder will continue to grow and is e...

The progression of malignant diseases is associated with excessive activity of the proteolytic enzymes involved in tumor growth, angiogenesis, migration, invasion and metastasis. Among them is a group of cysteine cathepsins that are present in normal cells in endosomes and lysosomes and are responsible for intracellular protein catabolism. In tumor cells these enzym...

Various types of cancers represent a great challenge to the health care system nowadays, since 3 million people are diagnosed for cancer annually in Europe. The efficacy of available anticancer medicines and therapeutic approaches is limited and often associated with serious side effects due to unspecific drug distribution in a human body. This problem can be preven...

Receptor activator of nuclear factor-κB ligand (RANKL) is a part of the RANKL/RANK/OPG system which plays a crucial role in bone resorption and several other physiological processes. RANKL deregulation has been implicated in osteoporosis (OP), osteoarthritis (OA), autoimmune diseases, chronic inflammatory diseases and various cancers, leading to approval of de...

Human cathepsin B is a lysosomal cysteine protease that has many house-keeping functions, such as intracellular proteolysis. It can act as both an endopeptidase and an exopeptidase, a characteristic that is attributed to a 21-amino-acid insertion above the active site. Dysregulation of cathepsin B activity is associated with many pathological states. The most thorou...