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donepezil (E 2022 / TK023 / TK 023)

✓ Approved

Eisai Co., Ltd. · ACHE · Small Molecule

What is donepezil?

donepezil is a small molecule developed by Eisai Co., Ltd.. It is approved for therapeutic indications via transdermal.

Drug Profile

Brand NamesE 2022, TK023, TK 023
CompanyEisai Co., Ltd.
Drug ClassSmall Molecule
Molecular TargetACHE
RouteTransdermal
StatusApproved
Sources: ClinicalTrials.gov, Eisai Co., Ltd.

Mechanism of Action

Molecular Targets

donepezil acts on 1 molecular target:

ACHEacetylcholinesterase (Cartwright blood group) (N-ACHE, ACEE)
Want deeper analysis?Noah AI can explain complex mechanisms and compare to similar drugs.

Therapeutic Indications

donepezil is developed for 1 unique indication across 1 therapeutic area.

Therapeutic AreaConditionPhase
Nervous system disordersDementia Alzheimer's typePhase I

Related Research Articles

PubMedBiomaterials science2026-10-15

Correction: Mechanical stress-driven conformational compaction of polydeoxyribonucleotide for enhanced transdermal regenerative therapy.

Jeon Saetbyeol S, Lee Jung Im JI, Shim Sung Bo SB, Kim Chul Hwan CH et al.

Correction for 'Mechanical stress-driven conformational compaction of polydeoxyribonucleotide for enhanced transdermal regenerative therapy' by Saetbyeol Jeon et al., Biomater. Sci., 2026, 14, 3995-4005, https://doi.org/10.1039/d6bm00713a.

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PubMedDrug delivery and translational research2026-10-15

Controlled solvent removal dynamics during fabrication of microneedle patches for the sustained release of etonogestrel.

Chen Jonathan Yuxuan JY, Terry Richard N RN, Tang Jie J, Zheng Tao T et al.

Biodegradable polymer-based microneedle (MN) patches enable self-administered, long-acting drug delivery. Controlled drug release from MNs requires controlled material distribution and minimal porosity in the MNs. MN detachment in the skin requires MNs without film formation beyond the MN base. To achieve these goals, we studied solvent removal dynamics during MN patch fabrication by a solvent-casting method to better control distribution of polymer and drug in the MN patch mold. More specifically, we designed casting solvents to control (i) solvent evaporation rate, (ii) solvent absorption rate into polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) molds, and (iii) solubility of biodegradable polymer (poly (lactic acid)) and drug (etonogestrel, for long-acting contraception) in the solvent. We found that polymer film formation was prevented by using solvents with minimal mold absorption and moderate evaporation rates. We further demonstrated that solvent-nonsolvent mixtures titrated to the solubility limit of the polymer and beyond the solubility limit of the drug (forming a suspension of fine precipitate) also produced MNs without films. This occurred even when using solvents that absorbed into the molds. To better achieve sustained drug release, we showed that centrifuge-based casting and heat annealing reduced surface and bulk MN porosity. The resulting MNs achieved efficient detachment in porcine skin and sustained release of etonogestrel for two months in-vitro. This study establishes a framework to control solvent removal dynamics during MN patch fabrication to optimize biodegradable polymer MNs for long-acting delivery of etonogestrel and other drugs.

PMID 42875716
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PubMedLaboratory animal research2026-10-15

Intraluminal micro-stenting improves urinary tract reconstruction in murine kidney transplant model.

Xu Zi-Jie ZJ, He Long L, Tang Zheng Z, Wang Ren-Jie RJ et al.

Urinary tract reconstruction is a key technical barrier in murine kidney transplantation due to the tiny ureteral caliber. Conventional methods are technically demanding with high morbidity. This study assesses a refined intraluminal stenting approach for better surgical stability, fewer complications, and preserved anti-reflux structural anatomy of the ureterovesical junction. We performed 88 orthotopic mouse kidney transplantations using three distinct reconstruction modalities: bladder patch (n = 31), ureter implantation (n = 28), and intraluminal stenting (n = 29). The stenting protocol utilized a micro-polyethylene (PE) stent to achieve end-to-end ureteral alignment. Outcomes included operative efficiency, learning curve trajectories, postoperative survival, and urinary-related morbidity. The stenting cohort achieved a 14-day survival rate of 96.6% (28/29), significantly higher than the bladder patch group (67.7%, 21/31; p = 0.006), while the difference compared with the ureter implantation group (82.1%, 23/28) did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.102). Intraluminal stenting markedly reduced reconstruction time (8'22''±0'41'', p < 0.05 vs. both control groups) and was associated with an accelerated proficiency acquisition curve. The overall urological morbidity in the stenting group was 10.3% (3/29), consisting of 1 case of mild urinary leakage and 2 cases of mild hydronephrosis, which was significantly lower than in the bladder patch (58.1%, 18/31) and ureter implantation (42.9%, 12/28) cohorts (p < 0.05 for morbidity comparison). Notably, this approach effectively precluded severe complications including ischemic necrosis, ureteral dislodgement, and obstruction, with no urinary tract reconstruction-related deaths observed. This retrospective study shows that the intraluminal stenting technique offers a reliable and highly reproducible approach for urinary tract reconstruction in murine kidney transplantation. This modality significantly minimizes technical complexity and postoperative morbidity, and maintains the intact ureterovesical anatomy that provides the structural foundation for physiological anti-reflux function. It provides an optimized surgical platform for short-term experimental protocols, particularly in acute rejection research.

PMID 42875810
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PubMedInflammopharmacology2026-10-15

Synergistic approaches to Alzheimer's disease: exploring the combined efficacy of phytoconstituents and conventional drugs.

Kumar Abhishek A

Cognitive functions deteriorate with Alzheimer's disease (AD), a kind of degenerative disease. Problems with memory, interpersonal interactions, problem-solving, and other cognitive functions that limit a person's ability to do daily tasks are the hallmarks of dementia. This condition affects about 50 million individuals globally. Traditional therapies for AD, like galantamine, donepezil, and memantine, only offer symptomatic alleviation through glutamatergic regulation and cholinergic augmentation, making AD a significant worldwide health concern. This review assesses the possibility of improving the effectiveness of therapy by combining significant phytoconstituents with traditional AD therapies. A complete literature review was carried out using peer-reviewed publications, experimental investigations, and review papers published from 2010 to 2025. The primary objective of the investigation was to study the interaction between phytoconstituents and conventional therapy in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Our outcomes demonstrate the powerful multi-target adjuvant properties of curcumin, resveratrol, quercetin, berberine, and luteolin. In particular, Berberine and Quercetin considerably reduce neuroinflammation and oxidative stress through the Nrf2/HO-1 and NF-κB pathways, whereas Curcumin and resveratrol enhance the anti-amyloidogenic effects of conventional medications. Additionally, luteolin exhibits a special capacity to regulate tau hyperphosphorylation, which enhances memantine's stabilising neurotransmitter actions. The primary objective of therapy has shifted from symptomatic relief to disease modification by the synergy between phytoconstituent and conventional drugs. These combinations preserve the structural integrity of the cholinergic synapse by concurrently mitigating oxidative stress and amyloid toxicity. A possible paradigm shift towards holistic neuroprotection is represented by the incorporation of these five essential phytoconstituents into traditional AD regimens. To ensure clinical translatability, future research must now focus on nanoformulations that can overcome the limited bioavailability of substances like curcumin. These methods may improve treatment effectiveness, lessen adverse effects, and reduce the chance of resistance, providing a more thorough method of handling the complexities of AD.

PMID 42875646
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PubMedHippocampus2026-10-15

Chronic Electroconvulsive Shock Disrupts Hippocampal Physiology and Impairs Associative Memory in Mice.

Zhang T R TR, Vyleta N P NP, Schwein I I, Askari B B et al.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a highly effective treatment for depression but it has undesirable side effects on various aspects of cognition, including memory. Patients may display retrograde amnesia for autobiographical events and anterograde amnesia in tests of recall and recognition memory. These amnestic effects are likely to depend, at least in part, on changes in the hippocampus. ECT-induced volume increases in the hippocampus and dentate gyrus subregion in particular correlate with the cognitive deficits. However, the precise cellular and behavioral effects of ECT remain poorly understood. Here, we therefore subjected male and female mice to chronic electroconvulsive shock (ECS) and examined effects on hippocampal physiology and memory. Perforant path inputs onto dentate gyrus neurons were examined using whole cell patch clamp recordings in hippocampal slices. In the intact slice, perforant path stimulation did not result in any synaptic or spiking differences in mice given sham versus ECS treatments. However, GABAA blockade increased EPSPs and spiking in sham, but not ECS-treated, mice. Voltage clamp recordings further revealed weaker perforant path excitation of dentate gyrus neurons in ECS-treated mice. Extrapolating these findings to the intact animal, we then used Fos expression as a proxy for neural activity and found that ECS blunted exploration-induced hippocampal activation, which was most pronounced in the dentate gyrus. Finally, recognition memory tasks revealed that ECS impaired memory for object-context associations but not memory for objects or locations. Collectively, these experiments reveal that a clinically relevant schedule of ECS disrupts synaptic and circuit functions of the hippocampus and causes anterograde amnesia in a test of episodic-like associative memory.

PMID 42876112
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PubMedFrontiers in artificial intelligence2026-10-15

Prior-Enhanced Axial TransUNet: integrating MedSAM priors and sparse region-aware attention for kidney-tumor segmentation.

Liang Siyuan S, Xu Cheng C, Lu Chao C, Bao Jiewen J et al.

Accurate kidney and renal-tumor segmentation is challenging because lesion size, location, morphology, and boundary contrast vary substantially across abdominal CT scans. Most existing methods rely on a single form of local evidence and struggle to recover the boundaries of small lesions while maintaining global anatomical consistency. This paper proposes Prior-Enhanced Axial TransUNet (PEAT), which combines the broad medical representations of foundation models with task-specific discriminative learning. PEAT introduces three core components: Bottleneck Semantic Alignment (BSA) uses the frozen MedSAM image encoder as a training-stage feature reference and guides the semantic organization of the task network's bottleneck representation through an L1 alignment constraint; Dual-path Attention-enhanced Fusion (DAF) adaptively fuses CNN local features with MaxViT global contextual features by cascading coordinate attention and SENetV2; and Bi-granular Region-Aware Attention (BRA) achieves efficient non-local context modeling through Top-k window routing and patch-level sparse interaction. The MedSAM branch participates only during training, and only the task-specific network runs at inference. Under a setting in which all compared methods adopt the same preprocessing and evaluation protocol, PEAT achieves kidney and tumor Dice scores of 97.69% and 91.83% on KiTS21 and 96.80% and 92.58% on KiTS23, respectively. Across all four tasks, PEAT attains the highest Dice among the compared methods; ablation studies further show that the progressive integration of BSA, DAF, and BRA yields consistent gains, with the complete model outperforming all single and pairwise configurations. These results indicate that combining training-stage broad feature guidance with task-specific representation learning effectively improves kidney and renal-tumor segmentation and provides a viable route for the coordinated design of foundation-model priors and lightweight task networks.

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