Designing Multi-Targeted Therapeutics for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease

Due to multi-faceted pathology of AD; no drug can seize the progress of the disease, whereas only the symptomatic treatment is available at the moment. Several drug classes to treat AD are available in clinical use, AChEIs being the most prescribed. In addition to AChEIs, secretase enzymes and iron chelators have turned out to be the focus of research and the popular targets in drug discovery against AD. The latest approaches such as immunotherapy, multi-targeted drug ligand design, AChE inhibitors, antioxidants, metal chelators, monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors, antiinflammatory drugs, and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) inhibitors are currently in use to cure this disease to some extent. But, there is a certain need to develop new drugs to fight with AD, particularly acting on multi-targets or with dual mechanisms of action. In this review, a particular emphasis will be focused on multitargets aiming at AD to design new drug molecules with respect to treatment strategies and preventive measures. Since the underlying pathogenesis of AD is complicated and still under investigation, the attempts to design highly selective and potent agents to treat AD are quite intensively continuing. In this respect, designing novel drugs with dual/multi-acting mechanisms seems to be more rational.