Recent Advances in Multi-target Anti-Alzheimer Disease Compounds (2013 Up to the Present)

Since the last century, when scientists proposed the lock-and-key model, the discovery of drugs has focused on the development of drugs acting on single target. However, single-target drug therapies are not effective to complex diseases with multi-factorial pathogenesis. Moreover, the combination of single-target drugs readily causes drug resistance and side effects. In recent years, multi-target drugs have increasingly been represented among FDA-approved drugs. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a complex and multi-factorial disease for which the precise molecular mechanisms are still not fully understood. In recent years, rational multi-target drug design methods, which combine the pharmacophores of multiple drugs, have been increasingly applied in the development of anti-AD drugs. In this review, we give a brief description of the pathogenesis of AD and provide detailed discussions about the recent development of chemical structures of anti-AD agents (2013 up to present) that have multiple targets, such as amyloid-β peptide, Tau protein, cholinesterases, monoamine oxidase, β-site amyloid-precursor protein-cleaving enzyme 1, free radicals, metal ions (Fe2+, Cu2+, Zn2+) and so on. In this paper, we also added some novel targets or possible pathogenesis which have been reported in recent years for AD therapy. We hope that these findings may provide new perspectives for the pharmacological treatment of AD.