Abstract
Diabetes mellitus is a chronic disease affecting patients' daily life and increasing patients' risk of other complication. Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) is a serine aminopeptidase, which is one of the validated targets for Type 2 diabetes therapy due to its regulatory effect of incretin hormone. Seven DPP-4 inhibitors are commercially available nowadays on the market as Type 2 diabetes drugs. They are all chemically synthesized compounds with good therapeutic effects, but long-term safety remains unknown. On the other hand, nature provides a rich source for search of desired safe and effective medications; and actually more than half of the drugs on market are natural product related. Therefore, a systematic search for new DPP-4 inhibitors from nature sources seems to be of great utility for developing novel antidiabetic drugs. This review summarized recent progress of DPP-4 inhibitors from natural products, revealed that both pure natural products and the crude extracts of herbs or the hydrolyzates of proteins are active as DPP-4 inhibitors. Therefore, both could be served as useful clues for developing next generation of antidiabetes medicines via inhibiting DPP-4 activity.
Financial & competing interests disclosure
The authors wish to thank the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai, China (15ZR1441200) and the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (2013JW09) for financial support. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.
No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript