There are a number of limitations of NPY as a therapeutic target, including a short half-life, the lack of channel of NPY across the BBB, and the inhospitable environment of the gastric mucosa. Moreover, the most difficult obstacles to overcome is the lack of passage across the BBB. Although prior studies have administered NPY via intravenous infusions, it is unclear how much, if any NPY enters the CNS (Chapman et al., 2013). In order to overcome this barrier, considerable effort needs to focus on seeking a kind of non-peptide agonist that can selectively act on different receptors of the CNS to exert its biological effect and achieving targeted treatment. At present, several selective NPY receptor agonists are already widely used in research, and new promising small molecules that can act as NPY receptor agonists or antagonists have been developed (Duvall et al., 2019). In addition to basic research, the clinical value of NPY needs to be further explored. There is an urgent need to explore the molecular mechanism of protective effect of NPY in neurodegenerative and neuroimmune diseases, for example which type of NPY receptor is the most important in CNS and what role does NPY play in different parts of brain tissue? If NPY can be used as a target to develop new drugs for treatment of neurodegenerative and neuroimmune disorders, it will be a major breakthrough in clinical practice.