Abstract
With the accelerated aging of human society, Alzheimer's disease (AD) is becoming one of the biggest threats to human health. Since multiple pathogenetic factors are implicated in the disease, the current hitting-one-target therapeutic strategy has proved inefficient to AD. As a result, finding multipotent agents that aim at multiple targets is attracting more and more attention. Although multifunctional anti-AD agents can be created by incorporating two or more pharmacophores in one scaffold, naturally occurring multipotent agents also attracted much attention. In this review, we first describe the functions of some typical naturally originated multipotent anti-AD compounds, then summarize their structural features and reveal that phenolics with certain flexibility predominate in these agents, which are of significance to find novel multipotent drugs to combat AD and other neurodegenerative diseases as well.
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Project supported in part by grants from National Basic Research Program of China (No 2003CB114400) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No 30100035, 30570383 and 30700113).
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Ji, Hf., Zhang, Hy. Multipotent natural agents to combat Alzheimer's disease. Functional spectrum and structural features. Acta Pharmacol Sin 29, 143–151 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-7254.2008.00752.x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-7254.2008.00752.x
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