Multi-Target Ligand Design for Potential Antipsychotic
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Biophysics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2023) | Viewed by 4963
Special Issue Editor
Interests: computer-aided drug design; medicinal chemistry; molecular modeling; CNS agents; GPCRs
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Schizophrenia is an important health issue, affecting almost 1% of the population, frequently with a strong social and economic impact, as patients often suffer from unemployment and are homeless. Antipsychotics used to treat schizophrenia are also prescribed in bipolar affective disorder, which has a prevalence of 2.3% in the population.
The marketed antypsychotics are ligands of aminergic G protein-coupled receptors, in particular dopamine D2 receptor. The detailed characterization of GPCR ligands has demonstrated that many drugs targeting GPCRs often display a high degree of promiscuity. The ability of GPCR drugs to interact with more than one receptor subtype at low concentrations was first considered a drawback for GPCR-oriented drug discovery. It turned out, however, that the efficacy of certain drugs targeting GPCRs is considered to be mediated by their capacity to regulate several targets at the same time—for instance, in the case of drugs related to the treatment of CNS diseases.
The modern approach to drug design and discovery for the treatment of complex diseases, such as schizophrenia, involves searching for medicinal substances which fulfil criteria of several pharmacophores, instead of acting on a single molecular target. The most commonly exploited approach to search for novel antipsychotics is designing compounds with intentional ligand promiscuity resulting in multi-target drugs. Targeting multiple receptors is a recommended approach for designing drugs for complex diseases including schizophrenia. Indeed, in complex psychiatric illnesses, including schizophrenia, selective single-target drugs have largely failed . The new paradigm in drug design and discovery is to search for compounds which modulate the activity of several molecular targets simultaneously. Efforts have been made to separate the desired targets from the off-targets.
In the light of the above in this Special Issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences, we would like to illustrate progress in the discovery of multi-target compounds as potential antipsychotics ranging from in silico studies and elaboration of new compounds to their preclinical and clinical evaluation.
Prof. Dr. Agnieszka A. Kaczor
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- antipsychotics
- schizophrenia
- multi-target compounds
- drug design
- CNS disorders
- medicinal chemistry
- in vitro studies
- in vivo studies
- molecular modeling
- preclinical studies
