A Mini Review on the Effectiveness of Peptoids as Therapeutic Interventions against Neurodegenerative Diseases

Neurodegenerative diseases emerged as one of the major age-associated diseases in the recent years. Hence, the urge for understanding the mechanism and to find targeted therapeutics becomes inevitable. Peptide-based compounds emerged as one of the important tools for its therapy. But due to a lack of tolerability, specificity and proteolytic degradation, it loses its applicability in a wider sense. Thus, the search for suitable alternatives or peptidomimetics becomes an important criterion for neurotherapeutics. One of the versatile peptidomimetics are N-substituted glycines or Peptoids, which retain many properties of peptides but are successful in evading the drawbacks of peptides. Peptoids are manifested with greater cellular permeability, less immunogenicity and their ability to be administered intra-nasally. These properties enhance their potential as neurotherapeutics with respect to their peptide counterpart. Recently, peptoids have been explored towards neurotherapeutic applications as aggregation inhibitors, cell signaling pathways modulator, and as agents for inhibiting inflammations via multiple mechanisms. Peptoids, due to their versatility and low production cost, are becoming popular among peptidomimetics as potential neurotherapeutic agents. In this review, the diverse applications of peptoids with respect to neurodegenerative disease have been explored.

Multicomponent Synthesis of Polyphenols and their in vitro Evaluation as Potential β-Amyloid Aggregation Inhibitors

While plant polyphenols possess a variety of biological properties, exploration of chemical diversity around them is still problematic. Here, an example of application of the Ugi multicomponent reaction to the combinatorial assembly of artificial, yet "natural-like", polyphenols is presented. The synthesized compounds represent a second-generation library directed to the inhibition of β-amyloid protein aggregation. Chiral enantiopure compounds, and polyphenol-β-lactam hybrids have been prepared too. The biochemical assays have highlighted the importance of the key pharmacophores in these compounds. A lead for inhibition of aggregation of truncated protein AβpE3-42 was selected.