Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 20, Issue 13, 2013

In the past decades drug discovery practice has escaped from the complexity of the formerly used phenotypic screening in animals to focus on assessing drug effects on isolated protein targets in the search for drugs that exclusively and potently hit one selected target, thought to be critical for a given disease, while not affecting at all any other target to avoid the occurrence of side-effects. However, reality does not conform Read More

The history of Fixed Dose Combination (FDC) oral drug products has been tumultuous over its history. Some FDCs were prepared for marketing purposes and others for clinical improvements. Often, the products prepared for marketing advantage ended up causing negative outcomes. However, in recent years, there has been a resurgence of FDCs as clinicians have found them adventitious for treatment of AIDS/HIV an Read More

Polypharmacology offers a model for the way drug discovery must evolve to develop therapies most suited to treating currently incurable diseases. It is driven by a worldwide demand for safer, more effective, and affordable medicines against the most complex diseases, and by the failures of modern drug discovery to provide these. Polypharmacology can involve combinations and/or multitarget drugs (MTD). Although not mut Read More

Prediction of polypharmacology of known drugs and new molecules against selected multiple targets is highly useful for finding new therapeutic applications of existing drugs (drug repositioning) and for discovering multi-target drugs with improved therapeutic efficacies by collective regulations of primary therapeutic targets, compensatory signalling and drug resistance mechanisms. In this review, we describe recent Read More

Neurodegenerative diseases are complex disorders with several pathoetiological pathways leading to cell death. Rationally designed multi-targeted agents, or “multi-targeted designed drugs” (MTDD) show significant promise in preclinical studies as neuroprotective and disease-modifying agents. In this review, we highlight the use of chemical scaffolds that lend themselves exquisitely to the development of MTDDs in neurodegener Read More

Modern medicinal chemistry has come to its bottleneck and is full of challenges, specially when facing with long-term central nervous system (CNS) disorders induced by several factors, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) or Parkinson's disease (PD). In order to probe these challenges, multi-target directed ligands (MTDLs) design has been applied recently by medicinal scientists trying to get single compounds that can simultaneousl Read More

The etiopathology of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is extremely complex and heterogeneous, often associated with comorbidities. As a result it may be unlikely that AD may be mitigated by drug acting on a single specific target. The current tendency in drug design and discovery in AD is the rational design or “serendipitous” discovery of new drug entities challenging multiple targets. Since two of the presently approved drugs for AD Read More

Balanced modulation of multiple targets is an attractive therapeutic strategy in treating complex diseases including cancer. Comparing with drugs combination, single molecule modulating desirable multiple targets has advantages in pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics. Different from previous reviews, we provided an overview of reported multitarget antitumor agents from the viewpoint of pharmacophores. These mul Read More

Protozoan infections are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality among parasitic infections of humans, accounting for approximately 800 thousand mortalities and a loss of more than 30 million disability-adjusted life years annually. The major protozoan infections of humans, namely malaria, Chagas disease, human African trypanosomiasis, and leishmaniasis, are primarily centered in the tropics, with a reach into som Read More

Multitarget-directed ligands (MTDLs), an emerging and appealing drug discovery strategy, utilizing a single chemical entity to inhibit multitargets, was confirmed to be effective in reducing the likelihood of drug resistance, diminishing problems of dosing complexity, drug-drug interactions and toxicities, as well as improving patient compliance. The exploration of MTDL strategy should be valuable in anti-HIV drug discovery. In thi Read More

Cardiovascular disease represents the main cause of death worldwide. Novel therapies to reduce elevated blood pressure and treat resistant hypertension, to consequently reduce the associated cardiovascular risk factors, are still required. Among the different strategies commonly used in medicinal chemistry to develop new molecules, the synthesis of multitarget/hybrid compounds combining two or more pharmacophor Read More

Arachidonic acid (ARA) undergoes enzyme-mediated oxidative metabolism, resulting in the formation of a number of biologically active metabolites. For over a century, these biochemical transformations have been the target of numerous pharmacological drugs for inflammation and pain. In particular, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) selective inhibitors (coxibs) are widely Read More