Drug discovery strategies for modulating oxidative stress in gastrointestinal disorders.

As with other pharmaceuticals, antioxidants have been generally developed following the basic principles of drug discovery; the recent focus of which is designing multi-potent natural antioxidants mainly through using rational design and target-based drug discovery strategies. Although there have been encouraging in-vivo studies on the use of antioxidants in gastrointestinal disorders, especially inflammatory bowel disease and gastritis, there have been considerable deficits regarding in-vitro and clinical applications that should be immediately addressed.