Application in Medicine

Sterilisable mouldings have found application in medicine and pharmacy. Because of their durability, nylon hair combs have found wide acceptance in spite of their higher cost. 

The Corey-Chaykovsky reaction incited some applications in medicinal chemistry. During the synthesis of analogs of fluconazole, an azole antifungal agent, treatment of 49 with 1 led to the corresponding epoxide, which was subsequently... 

In order to be successful as part of a medical device a polymer has to resist both biological rejection by the patient s body and degradation. The human body is an enviromnent which is simultaneously hostile and sensitive, so that materials for application in medicine must be carefully selected. The essential requirement is that these materials are biocompafible with the particular part of the body in which they are placed. The extent to which polymers fulfil this requirement of biocompafibility depends partly on the properties of the polymer and partly on the location in which they are expected to perform. For example the requirements for blood biocompafibility are stringent since blood coagulation may be triggered by a variety of materials. By contrast, the requirements for materials to be used in replacement joints in orthopaedic surgery are less severe and materials as diverse as poly (methyl methacrylate) and stainless steel can be used with minimal adverse reaction from the body. 

Both naturally occurring and artificial radioisotopes find application in medicine, industrial products, and consumer products. Some specific radioisotopes, called fall-out, are still found in the environment as a result of nuclear weapons use or testing. 

Polyamidoamine (PAMAM) dendrimers have drawn considerable interest in recent years due to their potential applications in medicine, nanotechnology, and catalysis (6,7). The ability to control dendrimer interior/exterior functionalities and the macromolecular architecture of PAMAM dendrimers... 

Potential PCL applications in medicine (these investigations are in progress) include characterization of disturbances in antioxidative homeostasis, in the following areas ... 

During the last decade, density-functional theory (DFT)-based approaches [1, 2] have advanced to prominent first-principles quantum chemical methods. As computationally affordable tools apt to treat fairly extended systems at the correlated level, they are also of special interest for applications in medicinal chemistry (as demonstrated in the chapters by Rovira, Raber et al. and Cavalli et al. in this book). Several excellent text books [3-5] and reviews [6] are available as introduction to the basic theory and to the various flavors of its practical realization (in terms of different approximations for the exchange-correlation functional). The actual performance of these different approximations for diverse chemical [7] and biological systems [8] has been evaluated in a number of contributions. 

Here, we will first give an introduction to the basic ideas underlying the Car-Parrinello method, especially addressed to complete newcomers in the field. We will then try to outline some of the recent methodological extensions, with particular emphasis on aspects with potential interest for applications in medicinal chemistry. The power and limitations of these new modeling tools will be illustrated with few selected examples. 

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