Publication alert! IALH Research Fellow Hector Caruncho has co-authored an article entitled Editorial: Natural products as drivers in drug development for neurodegenerative disorders with authors Joana Silva, Rebeca Alvariño, Márcia I. Goettert and Celso Alves. This editorial article was published in Frontiers.
Excerpt:
The prevalence of neurological disorders (NDs) is a large and increasing health burden worldwide and is one of the emerging reasons for morbidity, mortality, and cognitive impairment in aging. Impact of NDs is expected to significantly increase in the next decades due to the progressive aging of the world society (Feigin and Vos, 2019). In the specific case of neurodegenerative process, it leads to malfunctions and cellular death, which seems to be triggered by a set of complex biological mechanisms, such as protein aberrant aggregation, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, defective protein quality control, and degradation pathways, stress granules, and maladaptive immune response (Moujalled et al., 2021). Despite the advances achieved, the effectiveness of current drugs to control, delay, or block the NDs progression is still limited (Durães et al., 2018). Thus, the discovery and development of new therapeutic agents that can improve the currently therapeutic regimes are of utmost importance. Accordingly, a large focus has been placed on the potential of natural products (NPs) as new natural neuroprotective agents, essentially due to their scaffold diversity, structural complexity, and ability to activate several intracellular signaling pathways through distinct mechanisms of action while presenting fewer side-effects (Alghamdi et al., 2022).
To read the full article, see https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2022.932179/full