Current Drug Targets - Volume 26, Issue 6, 2025

Managing diabetic wounds is a significant challenge for healthcare professionals since severe complications and delayed recovery greatly impact the patients' quality of life. This article aimed to explore various factors affecting diabetic wound healing, the mechanism of wound healing, and potential natural products having wound healing capability. It focuses on mechanisms of action and the therapeutic effectiveness of the compounds employed in the management of diabetic wounds. The review discusses the function of nutrition in wound healing, emphasizing the significance of consuming adequate amounts of protein, energy, lipids, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and water to promote healing. Several herbs, including Rosmarinus officinalis, Carica papaya, Aloe vera, Annona squamosa, and Punica granatum, are being tested for wound healing qualities in diabetes circumstances. These plants have a variety of modes of action, including antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and immunomodulatory activities that help to speed up wound healing, stimulate collagen formation, and promote tissue regeneration. The variety of action mechanisms seen in natural products, especially in plants, offers hope for the treatment of diabetic wounds. It may also be possible to improve healing results and the quality of life of diabetes individuals with chronic wounds by including these herbal treatments in wound care programs.

Metallothionein 1J pseudogene (MT1JP) is a long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) that functions as a tumor suppressor in various malignancies. Reduced MT1JP expression is associated with increased tumor proliferation, migration, invasion, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), and treatment resistance in nine cancers, such as gastric cancer, intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, hepatocellular carcinoma, and breast cancer. Mechanistically, MT1JP acts as a competitive endogenous RNA (ceRNA) to regulate oncogenic microRNAs (miRNAs), including miR-92a-3p, miR-214-3p, and miR-24-3p. This regulation restores tumor suppressor genes, such as FBXW7, RUNX3, and PTEN, thereby disrupting oncogenic pathways, including PI3K/AKT, Wnt/β- catenin, and p53, promoting apoptosis, and inhibiting tumor progression. Clinically, MT1JP expression correlates with tumor grade, differentiation, TNM stage, lymph node metastasis, and patient prognosis, suggesting its potential as a diagnostic and prognostic biomarker. Furthermore, its therapeutic potential in RNA-based treatments has attracted significant attention. Despite these findings, questions remain regarding its role in epigenetic regulation, transcriptional control, and RNA delivery. This review explores the molecular mechanisms underlying MT1JP, highlighting its clinical relevance and potential as a therapeutic target. Future research should focus on elucidating its role in epigenetic regulation, overcoming challenges in therapeutic delivery, and validating its utility as a biomarker for different cancers. MT1JP holds promise for advancing precision oncology by providing innovative approaches for cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Neuron loss is the main feature of neurodegenerative diseases. The two most prevalent neurodegenerative illnesses are Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. While several medications are currently approved to treat neurodegenerative disorders, most of them only address the symptoms that are related to the disorders. Owing to their severity and complex multifactorial pathophysiology, the approved medications currently in clinical use have not demonstrated sufficient efficacy and have limited therapeutic options. Enhancing medicine quality can be achieved using highly efficient conjugate chemistry methods, necessitating ongoing discovery efforts on hybrid drugs in academia and industry. The present review illustrates hybrid compounds and the design strategies that helped to create them. Developing multi-target directed ligands (MTDLs) is a more advantageous and sensible strategy for treating long-term complex illnesses like neurodegenerative diseases. Compared to classic treatments, hybrid drugs can deliver combination therapies in a single multifunctional agent, making them more potent and specific. Three main objectives are being initiated by using hybridization techniques in drug design: (i) increasing selectivity, (ii) improving activity, and (iii) reducing toxicity. The development of hybrid medications may offer a valuable method for producing compounds that are less likely to develop resistance and more likely to be effective. Hybrid drugs hold great promise, but a few technical and regulatory obstacles must be overcome before they can be successfully used in clinical settings.