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Across communities worldwide, various new psychoactive substances (NPSs) continue to emerge, which worsens the challenges to global mental health, drug rules, and public health risks, as well as combats their usage. Specifically, the vast number of NPSs that are currently available, coupled with the rate at which new ones emerge worldwide, increasingly challenges both forensic and clinical testing strategies. The well-established NPS detection techniques include immunoassays, colorimetric tests, mass spectrometric techniques, chromatographic techniques, and hyphenated types. Nonetheless, mitigating drug abuse and NPS usage is achievable through extensive community-based initiatives, with increased focus on harm reduction. Clinically validated and reliable testing of NPS from human samples, along with community-driven solution, such as harm reduction, will be of great importance, especially in combating their prevalence and the use of other illicit synthetic substances. There is a need for continued literature synthesis to reiterate the importance of NPS, given the continuous emergence of illicit substances in the recent years. All these are discussed in this overview, as we performed another look into NPS, from differentiating the major groups and identifying with laboratory testing challenges to community-based initiatives.

The significant attention gained by food-sourced vitamins has provided insights into numerous current researches; for instance, the potential reversal of epigenetic age using a diet and lifestyle intervention, the balance between food and dietary supplements in the general population, the role of diet and food intake in age-related macular degeneration, and the association of dietary supplement use, nutrient intake and mortality among adults. As relevant literature about food-sourced vitamin increases, continuous synthesis is warranted. To supplement existing information, this perspective review discussed food-sourced vitamins for consumer diet and health needs, scoping from vitamin absorption, metabolic functions, utilization, to balancing nutritional requirements. Relevant literatures were identified through a search of databases like Google Scholar, Web of Science, the Interscience Online Library, ScienceDirect, and PubMed. We demonstrated that vitamins whether from plant- and animal-based sources are prerequisites for the metabolic functions of the human body. The fat- and water-soluble classification of vitamins remains consistent with their respective absorption and dissolution potentials, underpinned by numerous physiological functions. Vitamins, largely absorbed in the small intestine, have their bioavailability dependent on the food composition, its associated interactions, as well as alignment with their metabolic functions, which involves antioxidants, coenzymes, electron acceptor/donor, and hormones. Moreover, vitamin deficiencies, in every form, pose a serious threat to human health. Vitamin toxicities remain rare, but can still occur mainly from supplementation, although it appears much less in water-soluble vitamins of which some excesses get readily removed by the human body, different from the fat-soluble ones that are stored in tissues and organs. Besides discussions of absorption, transport, and cellular uptake of vitamins, this perspective review also included approaches to meeting vitamin requirements and therapeutic strategies against micronutrient deficiency and COVID-19. We have also attempted on how to strike the balance between food-sourced vitamins and dietary supplements.

A library with 63 paclitaxel analogues modified at the C10 position of paclitaxel has been prepared using parallel solution phase synthesis. Most of the C10 analogues were slightly less active than paclitaxel in the tubulin assembly assay and had reduced potency in the B16 melanoma and MCF-7 cell line cytotoxicity assays. These modifications at C10, however, did not lead to the total loss of activity, indicating that the C10 moiety of paclitaxel may not be directly involved in the drug-microtubule interactions, but could influence its binding affinity to P-glycoprotein. Approximately 50% of the analogues demonstrated better activity against the drug resistant cell line MCF7-ADR. However, the increase in activity was 10-fold at most. This result demonstrates that the cytotoxicity against this drug resistant cancer cell line is sensitive to structural changes at the C10 position of paclitaxel. It was also found that the presence of a nitrogen atom in the C10 substituent might play a role in the interaction of analogues with microtubules.