An Overview of Multifunctional Metal Chelators as Potential Treatments for Neurodegenerative Diseases

Despite their ever increasing societal burden, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease receive far less funding than other chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and stroke. Metal chelators have been recently proposed as treatments for these conditions due to the early involvement of mis-placed iron, copper and zinc in disease progression. However, due to the complex and multifactorial nature of disease pathogenesis, drugs with metal chelation as their only mode of action may not be sufficient to slow or stop disease progression. Thus multifunctional drugs with more than one mode of action besides metal chelation have been recently proposed as more promising treatments for these conditions. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of the development of these multifunctional metal chelators, as well as the parent metal chelators on which these drugs are based.