Current Therapy and Computational Drug Designing Approaches for Neurodegenerative Diseases -with Focus on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Background: Neurodegenerative diseases are age-related ailments which are characterized by progressive neuronal damage and loss. These diseases can be caused by both genetic and environmental factors. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are the most predominant neurodegenerative diseases. Though various research strategies have been employed to eliminate the cause of the disease, till date successful strategies available are symptomatic. Various compounds have been designed against the targets, such as BACE1, acetylcholinesterase, glycogen synthase kinase, muscarinic acetylcholine receptor etc. Methods: This review consists of information gathered from various research articles and review papers in the concerned field. An attempt was made to identify important findings from these papers. Important in silico techniques used in the identification of drug candidates and newly designed compounds as therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases were summarized. Results: Sixty papers were included in this review. A comprehensive overview of computer aided drug designing techniques used aimed at the identification of new drug candidates is provided. Ligand based drug design approaches such as QSAR, virtual screening and pharmacophore have been described. Current therapies used against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s have summarized. New compounds against the targets of for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s identified by computational screening of compounds have been summarized. Conclusion: The findings of this review confirm that therapies and current successful strategies for neurodegenerative disease are mainly symptomatic. Current research is mainly focused on preventing the progress of neurodegeneration. Various in silico techniques; ligand-based methods such as QSAR, virtual screening, pharmacophore mapping and structure-based methods such as homology modeling, docking studies have been used to identify therapeutic compounds for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.