Discovery of Natural Products as Potential Antidiabetic Agents

Dear Colleagues,

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a chronic disease that occurs when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or when the body cannot effectively use the insulin it produces. According to the International Diabetes Federation, more than 537 million people worldwide will be living with the disease by 2024. In addition, the World Health Organization estimates that DM caused 1.6 million deaths in 2016, making it one of the leading causes of death globally and a major public health problem that needs to be addressed.

In general, drugs with varied chemical structures are used for the therapeutic management of diabetes to normalize blood glucose levels through different mechanisms of action. These treatments are administered orally or parenterally for life, which often represents a high economic cost. In addition, the appearance of adverse effects or hypersensitivity reactions are situations that make it necessary to suspend the treatment given or change it constantly. Due to the above, it is important to establish and develop new agents with antidiabetic properties; in this sense, the establishment of new antidiabetic drugs for the treatment of chronic–degenerative diseases is one of the main areas of interest for science due to the alarming incidence increase, such as with DM, which has palliative but no curative treatments available.

One of the main sources of new molecules that have been used to obtain and develop drugs with important biological activities is natural products. Over the years, research into natural products with specific pharmacological applications for the treatment of DM has made it possible to identify functional molecules that have been used for the development of treatments that are currently used for this disease, e.g., biguanides such as metformin and gliflozins such as canagliflozin, drugs that were obtained from structural modifications of molecules isolated from natural products.

In this Special Issue, we aim to invite experts in the field of natural products to share their findings in order to share novel information that will provide the scientific community with knowledge on the advances that exist in the development of new treatments for DM.

Dr. Fernando Calzada
Dr. Miguel Valdes
Guest Editors

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• diabetes mellitus
• diabetes complications
• glucosidase inhibitors
• antidiabetic agents
• molecular mechanism
• new drug development
• pharmacology
• molecular docking assays