Targeted therapy for viral hepatitis

Efficient design of peptide-binding polymers using active learning approaches

Active learning (AL) has become a subject of active recent research both in industry and academia as an efficient approach for rapid design and discovery of novel chemicals, materials, and polymers. Herein, we have assessed the applicability of AL for the discovery of polymeric micelle formulations for poorly soluble drugs. We were motivated by the key advantages of this approach making it a desirable strategy for rational design of drug delivery systems due toto its ability to (i) employ relatively small datasets for model development, (ii) iterate between model development and model assessment using small external datasets that can be either generated in focused experimental studies or formed from subsets of the initial training data, and (iii) progressively evolve models towards increasingly more reliable predictions and the identification of novel chemicals with the desired properties. In this study, we compared various AL protocols for their effectiveness in finding biologically active molecules using synthetic datasets. We have investigated the dependency of AL performance on the size of the initial training set, the relative complexity of the task, and the choice of the initial training dataset. We found that AL techniques as applied to regression modeling offer no benefits over random search, while AL used for classification tasks performs better than models built for randomly selected training sets but still quite far from perfect. Using the best performing AL protocol,. Finally, the best performing AL approach was employed to discover and experimentally validate novel binding polymers for a case study of asialoglycoprotein receptor (ASGPR).

New therapies for chronic hepatitis B

Currently, the only therapy of proven benefit in chronic hepatitis B is interferon-alpha which leads to a long-term benefit in only one-third of patients. New therapies for hepatitis B fall into three categories; antiviral chemotherapy, immunomodulation with cell-based therapies, vaccines or cytokines, and gene therapy such as with antisense oligonucleotides, ribozymes or viral mutants. The most promising immediate approach to therapy is with the new nucleoside antivirals--lamivudine and famciclovir. These drugs are well absorbed orally, result in profound inhibition of circulating hepatitis B virus, and, in some cases, loss of hepatitis B e antigen and improvement in serum aminotransferases. Controlled trials of long-term famciclovir and lamivudine therapy currently underway aim to show whether these drugs are safe and can provide sustained inhibition of viral replication and attentant improvement in liver disease.