Multi-target drug design strategy and its research progress

Currently, single-target drugs are often difficult to achieve the desired results in the treatment of multifactorial diseases such as tumors, cardiovascular and endocrine diseases, and may also cause toxicity. Multi-target drugs can improve the efficacy, reduce side effect and drug resistance by regulating multiple links of the disease, showing good prospects for the application. The main aim of this article is to review the strategies of designing multi-target directed ligands (MTDLs) (including conjugated-pharmacophore, fused-pharmacophore and merged-pharmacophore) and the research progress in recent years. The existing problems and challenges of multi-target drugs are also discussed, to provide new ideas for the study of multi-target drugs.