Targeting Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor Delta (PPARδ): A Medicinal Chemistry Perspective.

One of the three subtypes of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) functioning as a transcription factor is the PPARβ or PPARδ. PPARδ is crucial to pathophysiological processes, including metabolic disorders, liver diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. In the past, the clinical development of PPARδ-selective agonist drugs has been stalled due to potential safety-related issues. Despite the elusiveness of such a drug, efforts continue in developing drugs that target PPARδ due to advances in the knowledge of the PPARδ receptor's structure and functions. While several preclinical and clinical studies are reported on PPARδ agonists, there is limited data with no clinical evidence available for PPARδ-selective antagonists. In this review, we mainly focus on the challenges of PPARδ selectivity and the medicinal chemistry of most active agonists discovered by different pharmaceutical companies and institutes. With this in mind, we also provide an update on the development status of PPARδ agonists that are undergoing clinical trials and their therapeutic promise for the treatment of various diseases.