94 papers
Pharmacology and toxicology explore how substances interact with living systems, ranging from the development of life-saving medicines to understanding the dangers of chemical exposure. This field sits at the critical intersection of chemistry and biology, asking essential questions about how drugs work, how the body processes them, and what happens when things go wrong. It is a dynamic area where researchers constantly strive to improve patient safety while discovering new therapeutic possibilities.
At Gist.Science, we bridge the gap between complex research and public understanding by curating the latest preprints from bioRxiv in this vital category. Our team processes every new submission from bioRxiv as it appears, transforming dense scientific data into both plain-language overviews and detailed technical summaries. This ensures that whether you are a specialist or a curious reader, you can grasp the significance of these emerging findings without getting lost in jargon.
Below are the most recent pharmacology and toxicology papers from bioRxiv, each accompanied by our expert analysis to help you navigate the latest scientific breakthroughs.
This study demonstrates that exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) accelerates *Drosophila melanogaster* juvenile development and disrupts mitochondrial metabolism, leading to increased metabolic heat production and heightened sensitivity to environmental stressors in a dose- and context-dependent manner.
The study demonstrates that 5-O-sulfamoyl adenosine (5-SA) inhibits the oncoprotein NSD1 to suppress cancer cell proliferation and tumor growth, while simultaneously enhancing the sensitivity of cancer cells and xenograft tumors to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) through synergistic effects.
This study combines computational network modeling and experimental validation to demonstrate that inhibiting DYRK1A promotes cardiomyocyte cell cycle re-entry and functional heart recovery following ischemic/reperfusion injury, identifying E2F1 as a key transcriptional driver of this regenerative process.
This study demonstrates that the stereochemical identity of lipid nanoparticles, particularly the cis isomer of the ionizable lipid cKK-E12, significantly enhances protein expression by modulating internal lipid organization and structural phases, thereby revealing a critical yet overlooked determinant of RNA delivery efficacy.
This study utilizes deep mutational scanning and computational methods to demonstrate that the CFTR corrector VX-121 generally enhances the expression of rare CF variants more effectively than VX-445, particularly for MSD1 mutations, while also revealing a specific variant (Y1032C) with reduced responsiveness and confirming that VX-121 avoids a key off-target interaction associated with VX-445.
This study demonstrates that in genetically diverse rats, higher severity of addiction-like behaviors, particularly escalated oxycodone intake and motivation, predicts more intense and prolonged withdrawal-induced mechanical allodynia, suggesting that pain sensitivity during abstinence serves as a robust marker of addiction severity.
Simpatico is an open-source, ultra-fast virtual screening tool that leverages atomic-level embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting protein-ligand binding, significantly outperforming both traditional docking and existing embedding-based methods in speed and precision without requiring 3D pose estimation.
This study demonstrates that a human immune system tumor-bearing mouse model treated with nivolumab and ipilimumab reproducibly recapitulates human ICI-induced nephrotoxicity, revealing that renal injury is driven by CD4+ T-cell enrichment and specific immune protein shifts rather than traditional biomarkers, thereby validating this platform for mechanistic investigation and therapeutic testing.
This study employs an integrative computational framework combining network pharmacology, machine learning, and ODE kinetic modeling to demonstrate that co-exposure to PFOS and PFOA drives prostate cancer progression by disrupting the androgen receptor axis, activating the PI3K-AKT pathway, and remodeling the tumor microenvironment into an immunosuppressive state, while identifying a synergistic drug combination of enzalutamide and Alpelisib as a potential therapeutic intervention.
Despite promising results in C. elegans models, this study demonstrates that 4-phenylbutyrate and AI-identified analogs fail to rescue locomotion deficits or reduce seizure activity in STXBP1-deficient zebrafish, arguing against their repurposing for treating STXBP1-related disorders.