Using Plants as a Source of Potential Therapeutics for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia with the numbers expected to increase dramatically as our society ages. There are no treatments to cure, prevent, or slow down the progression of the disease. Age is the single greatest risk factor for AD. However, to date, AD drug discovery efforts have generally not taken this fact into consideration. Multiple changes associated with brain aging, including neuroinflammation and oxidative stress, are important contributors to disease development and progression. Thus, due to the multifactorial nature of AD, the one target strategy to fight the disease needs to be replaced by a more general approach using pleiotropic compounds to deal with the complexity of the disease. In this perspectives piece, our alternative approach to AD drug development based on the biology of aging is described. Starting with plants or plant-derived natural products, we have used a battery of cell-based screening assays that reflect multiple, age-associated toxicity pathways to identify compounds that can target the aspects of aging that contribute to AD pathology. We have found that this combination of assays provides a replicable, cost- and time-effective screening approach that has to date yielded one compound in clinical trials for AD (NCT03838185) and several others that show significant promise.