Using Drosophila as a platform for drug discovery from natural products in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative movement disorder with no cure. Despite intensive research, most of the currently available therapies are only effective in alleviating symptoms with no effect on disease progression. There is an urgent need for new therapeutics to impede disease progression. Natural products are valuable sources of bioactive compounds that can be exploited for novel therapeutic potential in PD pathogenesis. However, rapid screening of plant-derived natural products and characterization of bioactive compounds is costly and challenging. Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly, has recently emerged as an excellent model for human neurodegenerative diseases, including PD. The high degree of conserved molecular pathways with mammalian models make Drosophila PD models an inexpensive solution to preliminary phases of target validation in the drug discovery pipeline. The present review provides an overview of drug discovery from natural extracts using Drosophila as a screening platform to evaluate the therapeutic potential of phytochemicals against PD.