Naturally occurring multipotent anti-Alzheimer's agents

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the greatest challenges to modern medicine because multiple pathogenetic factors are implicated in the disease and some are still unclear. Because the hitting-one-target therapeutic strategy has proved to be inefficient to AD, finding multipotent agents that can aim at multiple targets is attracting increasing attention. Although multifunctional agents can be produced by incorporating at least two pharmacophores in one framework, naturally occurring counterparts are more attractive. The authors describe the profile of naturally originated multipotent anti-AD compounds and the structural features of these compounds are summarised. Building on the structure-activity relationships, the authors identify more pleiotropic agents from natural product libraries, all of which are of great interest for further development.