Virtual screening in the search of new and potent anti-alzheimer agents

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a multifaceted neurodegenerative disorder for which there is no cure, but only symptomatic drugs are available. Most of the scientific efforts are addressed toward the employment of computational approaches able to speed up the discovery of putative anti-AD drugs. Among these, virtual screening allows to select very quickly and at extremely low cost compounds endowed with optimum physicochemical, pharmacokinetic, and biological properties to develop new potential drugs. This chapter presents recent works on the use of virtual screening for the design of specific ligands of targets related with AD, most of which were subsequently validated by experimental assays.