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A stroke, also known as a cerebral hemorrhage, occurs when there is an interruption in the blood supply to a part of the brain, resulting in damage to brain cells. This issue is one of the leading causes of death in developed countries, currently killing about 5 million people annually. Individuals who survive ischemic stroke often face serious vision problems, paralysis, dementia, and other sequelae. The numerous efforts to prevent and/or treat stroke sequelae seem insufficient, which is concerning given the increasing global elderly population and the well-known association between aging and stroke risk. In this review, we aim to present and discuss the importance of vitamins in stroke prevention and/or incidence. Vitamins from diet or dietary supplements influence the body at various levels; they are a relevant factor but are reported only in isolated articles. This review reports and updates the multitarget role of vitamins involved in reducing stroke risk., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.net.)

Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) techniques have garnered a great deal of attention in academia and industry because of their great versatility, low costs, possibilities of cost reduction in in vitro screening and in the development of synthetic steps; these techniques are compared with highthroughput screening, in particular for candidate drugs. The secondary metabolism of plants and other organisms provide substantial amounts of new chemical structures, many of which have numerous biological and pharmacological properties for virtually every existing disease, including cancer. In oncology, compounds such as vimblastine, vincristine, taxol, podophyllotoxin, captothecin and cytarabine are examples of how important natural products enhance the cancer-fighting therapeutic arsenal. In this context, this review presents an update of Ligand-Based Drug Design and Structure-Based Drug Design techniques applied to flavonoids, alkaloids and coumarins in the search of new compounds or fragments that can be used in oncology. A systematical search using various databases was performed. The search was limited to articles published in the last 10 years. The great diversity of chemical structures (coumarin, flavonoids and alkaloids) with cancer properties, associated with infinite synthetic possibilities for obtaining analogous compounds, creates a huge chemical environment with potential to be explored, and creates a major difficulty, for screening studies to select compounds with more promising activity for a selected target. CADD techniques appear to be the least expensive and most efficient alternatives to perform virtual screening studies, aiming to selected compounds with better activity profiles and better "drugability"., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.net.)

Background: Chagas' disease is one of the main causes of heart failure in developing countries. The disadvantages of current therapy include the undesirable side-effects, resistance, and therapeutic adhesion. The development of new efficient and safe drugs is, therefore, an issue of extreme importance., Objectives: In order to gain a better understanding of how the compounds interact with the target, computational methods are essential., Methods: In this theoretical study, we report a docking protocol applied to a dataset of 173 cruzain inhibitors with IC50 values of less than 10 µM, belonging 16 different chemical classes. A preliminary analysis was performed, where the best protein structure for the study was identified., Results: The enzyme was validated by redocking and a fingerprint graph for the ligand-enzyme interactions was generated, allowing the identification of the main amino acid residues related to the activity. Additionally, a larger cluster was generated, allowing the visualization of the orientation of the compounds and providing binding information for the different classes of compounds as well as their interaction in the cruzain active site. Amino acid residues other than those known as the catalytic triad (Gly23, Cys25, and Gly65) were identified, for example, Gln19 and Asp158., Conclusion: This provides a better insight into the mode of interaction of various cruzain inhibitors, which show IC50 values in the nanomolar range but which do not interact with the triad. These findings can help researchers to find new cruzain inhibitors for use in the fight against the Chagas disease., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.org.)

In this work, alternative heterojunction devices to be used for gamma-radiation detection are presented. The high quality silicon/polyaniline heterostructures use polyaniline thin films as an active part of the device structure. Polyaniline thin films 40 nm thick were deposited onto silicon substrates (n-type, <100>, 1 ohm x cm) using the spin-coating technique from soluble polyaniline. The devices present excellent electrical characteristics, with a rectification ratio of 60,000 at +/- 1.0 V, reverse currents in the order of a few nA and ideality factor approximately 2. These electrical characteristics indicate great potential for their use in sensor applications. The heterojunction diode is very sensitive to gamma radiation in the dose range of 0-7000 Gy, presenting a linear response in the forward and reverse bias. The excellent electrical characteristics, together with the linear response with the dose strongly suggest the application of this device for spectrometry or dosimetry of low and high doses of gamma ray radiation.