Discovery of MAO-B Inhibitors - Present Status and Future Directions Part I: Oxygen Heterocycles and Analogs

Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders. The role of monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors has expanded in the PD treatment. The present review will summarize the current structureactivity relationship information available on MAOs inhibitors of unrelated families of compounds of oxygen heterocyclic type based on coumarin, chromone and chalcone scaffolds. As the current hitting-one-target therapeutic strategy has been proved to be quite inefficient in PD, this review will also discuss about the development of multi-target drugs, in which MAO inhibition plays a counter-part, as a novel and promising treatment approach for PD.