Alzheimer's Disease Drug Discovery: Potential Therapeutic Strategies and Future Treatments

Neurodegenerative disease broadly includes many different diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, Huntington's, dementias with Lewy bodies, post-traumatic brain injury, and stroke. Although few common physiopathological changes have been discovered among these conditions, the semiology (if known), the triggered molecular pathways that lead to the observed pathologies, and the symptomatology are essentially different. These differences entail that the treatments, both current and future, have disease-specific indications. This idea led us to believe than it would be quite impossible to comprehensively review the progress made in drug discovery for all the neurodegenerative diseases and, therefore, we focused our attention in this review on the cutting-edge patents that pertain to the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Basic science discoveries have identified new targets/leads that have led the scientific community to develop new research initiatives in order to develop novel therapeutics entities and approaches. The purpose of this review is to discuss, through cutting-edge patents, the emergence of potential future treatments of AD. We hope to provide the reader with a broader and better understanding of what could be new therapies for AD during the next decade.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease, treatment, secretase, vaccine, amyloid binding, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, metal chelators, glycogen synthase kinase 3