Abstract:
It is essential to acknowledge the efforts made thus far to manage or eliminate
various disease burden faced by humankind. However, the rising global trends of the socalled incurable diseases continue to put pressure on Pharma industries and other drug
discovery platforms. In the past, drugs with more than one target were deemed as undesirable
options with interest being on the one-drug-single target. Despite the successes of the singletarget drugs, it is currently beyond doubt that these drugs have limited efficacy against
complex diseases in which the pathogenesis is dependent on a set of biochemical events and
several bioreceptors operating concomitantly. Different approaches have thus been proposed
to come up with effective drugs to combat even the complex diseases. In the past, the focus
was on producing drugs from screening plant compounds; today, we talk about combination
therapy and multi-targeting drugs. The multi-target drugs have recently attracted much
attention as promising tools to fight against most challenging diseases, and thus a new
research focus area. This review will discuss the potential impact of multi-target drug
approach on various complex diseases with focus on malaria, tuberculosis (TB), diabetes
and neurodegenerative diseases as the main representatives of multifactorial diseases. We
will also discuss alternative ideas to solve the current problems bearing in mind the fourth
industrial revolution on drug discovery
