Oxydative stress: from molecular structure to health

The evolution of our planet, via the oxygen enrichment of the atmosphere, led the progress of living organisms by incorporating reactive oxygen species (ROS) in vital biological processes. At those days, when concentrations of ROS exceeded the vital balance, the exceeding ROS attacked molecules that kept the structure and function of the living organism. To preserve their structural and functional integrity, living organisms developed antioxidant barriers and they could restore the ROS equilibrium and preserve functional biological molecular structures.

Actually, several millions of years after that, we have identified this ROS unbalance as a pathological condition named: oxidative stress. This condition has catched the attention of several physicians, biologist and researchers of different areas due to its relationship with the development of diseases like cardiopathies, arthritis, ischemia-reperfusion, cancer, male infertility, diabetes, eye macular damage, Alzheimer, Parkinson, the consequent aging, and several others.

For years, many scientific efforts have been done to provide new antioxidants able for therapeutics or pharmacological treatment for the later mentioned illness but, the race between the development of ROS related illness and the number of successful antioxidants compounds and those approved to be used for pharmacological or therapeutically purposes, is a difficult task. Some of the obstacles start with the number of molecules to test, the time for testing and some other policy to let the successful antioxidant compounds to be commercially available.

It is clear that the developing of different strategies to improve the antioxidant drug design is an important issue if we want to be healthy people. In this talk, I will present the strategy for the joint use of theoretical and spectroscopic tools, in order to improve the develop of new and real potent antioxidant drugs.

Keywords

oxidative stress, molecular structure, metalloproteins, solid state nuclear magnetic resonance, chemical reactivity.