Antioxidant Drug Design: Historical and Recent Developments

Abstract

The sustained interest in the design of potent antioxidants drugs over the years can be attributed to the indispensable roles antioxidants play in the mitigation of oxidative stress and its concomitant diseases. The high demand for exogenous antioxidants has been ascribed to the prevalence of oxidative stress-mediated diseases such as cancer, diabetes, stroke, cell aging, arteriosclerosis and central nervous system disorders occasioned by a biochemical disequilibrium between the production of free radicals and the body’s ability to eliminate these reactive species from the biological system. COVID-19 severity and death have been linked to a free radical generating process known as the cytokine storm. In an attempt to maintain optimal body function, antioxidant supplementation has increasingly become a wide spread practice because of antioxidants’ ability to directly scavenge free radicals, inhibit oxidative chain reactions thereby increasing the antioxidant defenses of the body. Recent data showed that researchers had made significant efforts to demonstrate the importance and timeliness of antioxidant therapy based on drug design from natural and synthetic sources. Therefore this review presents antioxidant drug design methodologies, identifying the lead and hits to provide a historical and up-to-date collection of research briefs on antioxidant drug design into a single piece in order to ensure easy accessibility, motivate readership and inspire future researches.