Therapeutic Advances in the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease: Present and Future

Priti      Jain; Hemant      R. Jadhav

Abstract

The underlying pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is complex and is still under exploration. This has hampered the attempts to design highly selective and potent agents to treat AD. This review summarizes the present status of AD, present strategies and hypotheses (with underlying upstream and downstream events) for designing new drugs for AD. It also appraises the drugs based on present strategies that are in various stages of clinical trials, failures and the reasons for their failure. Further, it describes the future strategies being adopted for the anti-alzheimer's drug design. The recent approaches like immunotherapy, multi-targeted drug ligand design, usage of electromagnetic radiation and nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery are upcoming tools to overcome the impediment and have been discussed in this review.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease, beta-secretase, secretase inhibitors, Amyloid cascade hypothesis, immunotherapy, multi-targeted drug ligand design, electromagnetic radiation and nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery, Cholinestrase inhibitors, secretase, amyloid