Ricerc@Sapienza

Hydroxycinnamic acids (HCAs) are important natural phenolic compounds present in high concentrations in fruits, vegetables, cereals, coffee, tea and wine. Many health beneficial effects have been acknowledged in food products rich in HCAs; however, food processing, dietary intake, bioaccessibility and pharmacokinetics have a high impact on HCAs to reach the target tissue in order to exert their biological activities. In particular, metabolism is of high importance since HCAs' metabolites could either lose the activity or be even more potent compared to the parent compounds.

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is considered to be the most common chronic liver disease. The discovery of natural product-based NAFLD modulators requires a more comprehensive study of their modes of action (MoAs). In this study we analysed available in the literature data for 26 naturally-derived compounds associated with experimental evidence for NAFLD alleviation and outlined potential biomolecular targets and a network of pharmacological MoAs for 12 compounds with the highest number of experimentally supported MoA key events, modulated by them.

In the last years the continuous efforts in the development of novel and effective inhibitors of human
monoamine oxidases (hMAOs) promoted the discovery of new agents able to effectively and selectively
bound one of the two isoforms (hMAO-A and hMAO-B). However, the parent chalcone scaffold still
covers an important role in hMAOs inhibition. In the present work, we focused our attention on the
researches performed in the last five years, involving chalcones or compounds that can be correlated to

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common pediatric malignancy. Although the therapy of ALL has significantly improved, the heterogeneous genetic landscape of the disease often causes relapse, which is difficult to treat. Achieving a positive outcome for patients with relapsed or refractory ALL remains a challenging issue.