MC1R and diabetic retinopathy: According to the preliminary pre-clinical studies supporting that melanocortin receptors (MC1R and MC5R) agonists exert anti-angiogenic activity in in vitro and in vivo models of diabetic retinopathy, we planned to explore the binding of axitinib to these receptors through a molecular modeling approach, molecular dynamics and docking simulations, as previously described by Gesualdo et al. in 2021 (Gesualdo et al., 2021).