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Objective: Pharmaceutical serialization is a process in the pharmaceutical industry that offers a secure solution to track and authenticate drugs in the distribution chain. The unique recognition number for every drug unit helps to identify and combat counterfeit products. This paper aims to highlight the advantages of serialization implementation as an innovative tool to combat globally the counterfeiting drugs phenomenon.

Chemical peel is a dermato-cosmetic procedure used to destroy and remove, in a controlled manner and under the supervision of the specialists, the degraded parts of the skin, in order to allow acceleration of the skin regeneration process. Based on their depth of skin penetration chemical peels are classified into superficial, medium and deep peels. The substances used in the chemical peels differ from each other depending on the effective action depth. Different peel agents with an appropriate peel depth should be selected based on the problem to be treated, considering also the nature of skin pathology. To achieve the best results other factors, such as skin type and characteristics, region to be treated, safety issues, healing time, and patient adherence, should also be considered. The present review focuses on the particularities of the substances used in various peel types, highlighting recent advances in chemical peel technology and explaining suggested application of certain substances in different peel types.

Prodrugs are chemically modified derivatives introduced in therapy due to their advantageous physico-chemical properties (greater stability, improved solubility, increased permeability), used in inactive form. Biological effect is exerted by the active derivatives formed in organism through chemical transformation (biotransformation). Currently, 10% of pharmaceutical products are used as prodrugs, nearly half of them being converted to active form by hydrolysis, mainly by ester hydrolysis. The use of prodrugs aims to improve the bioavailability of compounds in order to resolve some unfavorable characteristics and to reduce first-pass metabolism. Other objectives are to increase drug absorption, to extend duration of action or to achieve a better tissue/organ selective transport in case of non-oral drug delivery forms. Prodrugs can be characterized by chemical structure, activation mechanism or through the presence of certain functional groups suitable for their preparation. Currently we distinguish in therapy traditional prodrugs prepared by chemical derivatisation, bioprecursors and targeted delivery systems. The present article is a review regarding the introduction and applications of prodrug design in various areas of drug development.

Objective: Antibacterial quinolones represent an important class of pharmaceutical compounds that are widely used in therapy. Analytical methods that rely on their property to absorb light in the UV range are commonly used for their analysis. In the current study we present an interpretation of the relationship between chemical structure – UV spectra based on the comparative examination of UV spectral behavior of the eighteen quinolone derivatives and four model compounds. Methods: Eighteen quinolone derivatives and four model compounds were selected and their UV spectra were recorded in different solvents (methanol, 0.1M HCl, 0.1M NaOH). Results: The studied compounds show three absorption maximum values located around 210-230 nm, 270-300 nm and 315-330 nm values. A general characteristic was observed as the absorption bands exhibited both hypsochrome and bathochrome shifts, by comparison in different solvents. Most commonly we observed a slight hypsochrome shift at acidic pH (protonated form prevails) and basic pH (anionic form prevails). The structural differences are reflected in changes of UV spectra only when there are auxochrom substituents or different basic substituents are present in the quinolones structure. Conclusions: The correlations between the chemical structure of quinolone derivatives and their UV spectra using model compounds were established. This study provides useful information that can be used successfully in various UV spectrophotometric analysis methods or in more complex analytical methods using UV detection, and also in pharmacodynamic and kinetic studies.

The aim of this study to inventory the main electrophoretic methods for identification and quantitative determination of fatty acids from different biological matrices. Critical analysis of electrophoretic methods reported in the literature show that the determination of polyunsaturated fatty acids can be made by: capillary zone electrophoresis, micellar electrokinetic chromatography and microemulsion electrokinetic chromatography using different detection systems such as ultraviolet diode array detection, laser induced fluorescence or mass – spectrometry. Capillary electrophoresis is a fast, low-cost technique used for polyunsaturated fatty acids analysis although their determination is mostly based on gas chromatography.