World Alzheimer’s Day 2020

Established by Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) on September 21, 1994, the tradition to mark World Alzheimer’s Day has since spread around the world. Moreover, the international campaign of World Alzheimer’s Month was launched in 2012, appointing every September for the promotion of Alzheimer-related dementia awareness and the struggle against the common stigma that surrounds the condition. This year, under the title Let's talk about dementia, Alzheimer’s associations and partner organizations encourage everyone to get insight into dementia issues and corresponding health care problems.

The incidence of Alzheimer’s disease grows unbelievably fast – it becomes one of the most serious health and social crises worldwide [1,2]. Presently, there is no cure for dementia as current treatments mostly offer low symptomatic effects. Early stages of illness are difficult to diagnose and the lack of awareness makes people think that Alzheimer’s is a stage of normal aging, or, on the contrary, mystifies and stigmatizes it. This list of unresolved challenges is far from being exhaustive. In response to the need for dementia-related actions, the World Health Organization developed the Global action plan, providing strategies for disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment, improving information systems, and supporting research and innovation.

From the scientific point of view, Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most obstinate medical problems. Existing medications fail to stop the progression of dementia, and numerous drug discovery programs have shown low success rates. Accepting the challenge of this arduous task, research teams put tremendous efforts in understanding key mechanisms of disease progression, as well as in drug design and development [3-6].  In search of a working drug to fight Alzheimer’s various strategies are adopted, from computational approaches [7,8] to multiple clinical trials [9,10] (Fig. 1).

Supporting drug development projects in the field of Alzheimer’s disease, Life Chemicals is offering:

• CNS Screening Library: a collection of 9,900 potentially CNS-active compounds, selected according to up-to-date studies
• NMDA Receptor Screening Library: 1,000 potential NMDA channel blockers, selected with molecular docking
• Alzheimer’s Targeted Compound Set: 330 close analogues of known inhibitors of the reported therapeutic targets for Alzheimer's disease [4]

For any details,  you are most welcome to contact us at orders@lifechemicals.com. Please, visit our Website for more information and download SD files with compound structures in the Downloads section.

Figure 1. Drugs in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s (as of February 2019). Picture credit: Cummings, J. et al., 2019 [9]

Figure 2. Example of representative analogs (obtained using 2D fingerprint similarity search) of known inhibitors of the reported therapeutic targets for Alzheimer's disease from the Alzheimer’s Targeted Compound Set.

References

1. Khachaturian, Z. S., & Radebaugh, T. S. (Eds.). (2019). Alzheimer's disease: cause (s), diagnosis, treatment, and care. CRC Press.
2. Wisniewski T., ed. Alzheimer’s Disease. (2019). Brisbane (AU): Codon Publications.
3. Wong, K., Riaz, M., Xie, Y., Zhang, X., et.al. (2019). Review of Current Strategies for Delivering Alzheimer’s Disease Drugs across the Blood-Brain Barrier. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 20(2), 381. doi:10.3390/ijms20020381
4. Chaudhary A., Maurya P.K., Yadav B.S., Singh S., Mani A. (2018) Current Therapeutic Targets for Alzheimer's Disease. J Biomed 3:74-84. doi:10.7150/jbm.26783.
5. Lao, K., Ji, N., Zhang, X., Qiao, W., Tang, Z., & Gou, X. (2018). Drug development for Alzheimer’s disease: review. Journal of Drug Targeting, 1–10. doi:10.1080/1061186x.2018.1474361
6. Loera‐Valencia, R., Cedazo‐Minguez, A., Kenigsberg, P., Page, G., et.al. (2019). Current and emerging avenues for Alzheimer’s disease drug targets. Journal of Internal Medicine. 286(4), 398-437. doi:10.1111/joim.12959
7. Pradeepkiran, J., & Reddy, P. (2019). Structure Based Design and Molecular Docking Studies for Phosphorylated Tau Inhibitors in Alzheimer’s Disease. Cells, 8(3), 260. doi:10.3390/cells8030260
8. Mouchlis, V.D.; Melagraki, G.; Zacharia, L.C.; Afantitis, A. (2020). Computer-Aided Drug Design of β-Secretase, γ-Secretase and Anti-Tau Inhibitors for the Discovery of Novel Alzheimer’s Therapeutics. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21(3), 703. doi:10.3390/ijms21030703
9. Cummings, J., Lee, G., Ritter, A., Sabbagh, M., & Zhong, K. (2019). Alzheimer’s disease drug development pipeline: 2019. Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, 5, 272–293. doi:10.1016/j.trci.2019.05.008
10. Elmaleh, D. R., Farlow, M. R., Conti, P. S., Tompkins, R. G., et.al. (2019). Developing effective Alzheimer’s disease therapies: clinical experience and future directions. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 71(3), 715-732.