Curcumin ligand based iridium(III) complexes as inhibition and visualization agent of beta-amyloid fibrillation

Transition Metal Complexes as Therapeutics: A New Frontier in Combatting Neurodegenerative Disorders through Protein Aggregation Modulation

Neurodegenerative disorders (NDDs) are a class of debilitating diseases that progressively impair the protein structure and result in neurological dysfunction in the nervous system. Among these disorders, Alzheimer's disease (AD), prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), and Parkinson's disease (PD) are caused by protein misfolding and aggregation at the cellular level. In recent years, transition metal complexes have gained significant attention for their potential applications in diagnosing, imaging, and curing these NDDs. These complexes have intriguing possibilities as therapeutics due to their diverse ligand systems and chemical properties and can interact with biological systems with minimal detrimental effects. This review focuses on the recent progress in transition metal therapeutics as a new era of hope in the battle against AD, CJD, and PD by modulating protein aggregation in vitro and in vivo. It may shed revolutionary insights into unlocking new opportunities for researchers to develop metal-based drugs to combat NDDs.

2-Phenylbenzothiazolyl iridium complexes as inhibitors and probes of amyloid β aggregation

The aggregation of amyloid β (Aβ) peptides is a significant hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD), and the detection of Aβ aggregates and the inhibition of their formation are important for the diagnosis and treatment of AD, respectively. Herein, we report a series of benzothiazole-based Ir(III) complexes HN-1 to HN-8 that exhibit appreciable inhibition of Aβ aggregation in vitro and in living cells. These Ir(III) complexes can induce a significant fluorescence increase when binding to Aβ fibrils and Aβ oligomers, while their measured log D values suggest these compounds could have enhanced blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability. In vivo studies show that HN-1, HN-2, HN-3, and HN-8 successfully penetrate the BBB and stain the amyloid plaques in AD mouse brains after a 10-day treatment, suggesting that these Ir(III) complexes could act as lead compounds for AD therapeutic and diagnostic agent development.

Effect of mono- and diketone group in curcumin analogues on amyloid fibrillation of hen egg white lysozyme

Curcumin has attracted more attention because of its inhibition efficacy on protein amyloid fibrillation. However, the inhibition mechanism was still ambiguous and the clinical application of curcumin was greatly limited because of its poor stability at physiological conditions for the presence of β-diketone moiety. In this paper, a new mono-ketone-containing curcumin analogue (MDHC) was designed and synthesized to realize the possible inhibition mechanism and unveil the important role of β-diketone moiety of curcumin in the inhibition process of amyloid fibrillation using hen egg white lysozyme (HEWL) as model protein. Although all experiment results (ThT, CR, ANS and TEM) showed that the inhibitory capacity of curcumin was better than MDHC, MDHC still could show obvious inhibition effect. Molecular docking showed that both curcumin and MDHC could bind with HEWL by hydrogen bond of phenloic hydroxyl and the binding energy of MDHC was higher than that of curcumin. All the findings inferred that β-diketone group was one of great important groups in the inhibition process of HEWL amyloid fibrillation, which provided more room to construct novel inhibition reagents.