Natural Products and its Derived Drugs for the Treatment of Neurodegenerative Disorders: Alzheimer's Disease-A Review

Natural products once served humankind as the source of all drugs, and higher plants provided most of these therapeutic agents. Natural products continue to provide useful drugs in their own right but also provide templates for the development of other compounds. A major advantage of natural products approach to drug delivery is that it is capable of providing complex molecules that is not accessible by other routes. Among CNS disorders, neurodegenerative disorders affects majority of population worldwide. Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), Huntington's disease (HD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are currently incurable pathologies with huge social and economic impacts closely related to the increasing of life expectancy in modern times. Although the clinical and neuropathological aspects of these debilitating disorders are distinct, they share a pattern of neurodegeneration in anatomically or functionally related regions. The majority of the compounds examined to date with a direct relevance to AD are primarily from plants, from animal, marine and microbial sources. Successful drugs achieved so far are found to act by inhibiting acetyl cholinesterase enzyme. In future, more emphasis should be given in finding new targets for AD therapies. The review focuses on the natural products that might underlie the purported beneficial improvements in memory and cognition, neurovascular function, and in neuroprotection. It may be concluded that natural product chemistry brings tremendous diversity and historical precedent to a huge area of unmet medical need. Cooperative effort from all the technical disciplines related to drug discovery should be continued to make plant-derived natural product research an essential contributor in future.

Author(s): Babitha K Vazhayil, R Shanmuga Sundaram, V M Annapandian, B R Abhirama, M Sudha, T Thiyagarajan, K Gladys Kalpana and S Pushpa

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