Molecular targets for therapy in systemic sclerosis

Despite significant advances have been made in the recent years regarding organ-specific therapies, there is no approved 'disease-modifying' antifibrotic drug for systemic sclerosis (SSc) available to date. Although non-selective immunosuppressive agents are routinely used to treat patients with SSc, large well-controlled studies are lacking for almost all immunosuppressive agents and further evidence is required for long-term beneficial effects of these drugs. Considering these facts about immunosuppressive agents in SSc and also considering the high mortality of SSc, other therapeutic strategies are urgently needed. Recently an important role of the 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT: serotonin) pathway in fibrosis was reported. In this review, we discuss the role of 5-HT in fibrosis and therapeutic potential of this molecule. Besides 5-HT, there are a number of promising targets that have been extensively characterized in recent years. For many of these molecular targets, modifiers are readily available for clinical studies, and often these modifiers are used already in clinical use for other diseases. Results from these studies will show, in how far the promising preclinical results for novel antifibrotic strategies can be translated to clinical practice

Band Structure and Quantum Conductance of Metallic Carbon Nanotube Superlattices

The electronic structure and quantum conductance of rotationally invariant (6,6)/(12,0) and rotationally non-invariant (5,5)/(8,2) superlattices made of metallic carbon nanotubes are investigated. It is shown that, except in the limit of very large periods, the quantum conductance of such superlattices does not critically depend on their rotational invariance, although it does in case of quantum dots and single junctions made of these nanotubes