Drug Repurposing for Retinoblastoma: Recent Advances.

Retinoblastoma is the intraocular malignancy that occurs during early childhood. The current standard of care includes chemotherapy followed by focal consolidative therapies, and enucleation. Unfortunately, these are associated with many side and late effects. New drugs and/or drug combinations need to be developed for safe and effective treatment. This compelling need stimulated efforts to explore drug repurposing for retinoblastoma. While conventional drug development is a lengthy and expensive process, drug repurposing is a faster, alternate approach, where an existing drug, not meant for treating cancer, can be repurposed to treat retinoblastoma. The present article reviews various attempts to test drugs approved for different purposes such as calcium channels blockers, non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs, cardenolides, antidiabetic, antibiotics and antimalarial for treating retinoblastoma. It also discusses other promising candidates that could be explored for repurposing for retinoblastoma.

An Insight into Powdery Mildew-Infected, Susceptible, Resistant, and Immune Sunflower Genotypes.

Powdery mildew (PM, caused by Golovinomyces orontii) is one of the major diseases on sunflower that causes severe yield losses in the tropics. Sources of resistance to PM are reported in an exotic accession and some wild Helianthus species. The present study aims at quantitative proteomic analysis of susceptible, resistant, and immune genotypes of sunflower in response to PM infection at 3, 7, 10 days post infection. The majority of differentially expressed proteins in the resistant genotype belonged to oxidative stress (catalase, ATP-sulfurylase, and formate dehydrogenase), defense (HSP-70, heat shock transcription factors), and photosynthesis (LHCB3). In case of immune genotype, 50% of proteins are related to photosynthesis, which play a key role in plant immunity, whereas a few similar proteins are also expressed in the susceptible genotype, but in their reduced abundance besides being inadequate in timing of expression probably leading to its susceptibility to PM. KEGG enrichment analysis shows that carbon metabolism (6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase, pyruvate dehydrogenase, glutamine synthetase), photosynthesis, and plant-pathogen protein pathways are key pathways governing the resistance. The transcriptional expression of eight of nine differentially expressed proteins are in agreement with the expression of proteins at the corresponding time. The present study provides information on the key proteins that are upregulated in resistant and immune genotypes which restrict the disease progression and constitutes the first quantitative proteomic data of sunflower-PM infection process.