Editorial: Oxidative Stress: How Has It Been Considered in the Design of New Drug Candidates for Neurodegenerative Diseases?

摘要

Central Nervous System (CNS) disorders affect millions of people worldwide (Feigin et al., 2019). Despite their growing impact on health systems and the urgent need for new, safer, and more effective drugs, the Pharmaceutical Industries have avoided efforts to develop new candidates due to high costs and low success rates in the clinical phase (Seyhan, 2019), mainly because of the insufficient knowledge of the mechanisms underlying CNS dysfunctions (Gribkoff and Kaczmarek, 2017). In this scenario, neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), i.e., those that result from loss of function and death of nerve cells in the brain or peripheral nervous system, such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Huntington’s disease (HD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), deserve to be highlighted due to their increasing prevalence, most of the time dependent on age, and the absence of treatments capable of controlling and reversing the processes associated with their pathogenesis (Martin, 1999). Therefore, the need for a better understanding of the complex mechanisms associated with the genesis of NDs and the development of new therapeutically effective approaches become essential (Golde, 2009; Santiago et al., 2017).