Editorial to the Special Issue–“Natural Products and Drug Discovery” (original) (raw)

Natural Products for Drug Discovery in the 21st Century: Innovations for Novel Drug Discovery

International journal of molecular sciences, 2018

The therapeutic properties of plants have been recognised since time immemorial. Many pathological conditions have been treated using plant-derived medicines. These medicines are used as concoctions or concentrated plant extracts without isolation of active compounds. Modern medicine however, requires the isolation and purification of one or two active compounds. There are however a lot of global health challenges with diseases such as cancer, degenerative diseases, HIV/AIDS and diabetes, of which modern medicine is struggling to provide cures. Many times the isolation of "active compound" has made the compound ineffective. Drug discovery is a multidimensional problem requiring several parameters of both natural and synthetic compounds such as safety, pharmacokinetics and efficacy to be evaluated during drug candidate selection. The advent of latest technologies that enhance drug design hypotheses such as Artificial Intelligence, the use of 'organ-on chip' and micr...

Journey of Natural Products: From Isolation Stage to Drug’s Approval in Clinical Trials

Bioactivities

Nature serves as an excellent inspiration for researchers in the fields of chemistry and medicine. Terrestrial or marine organisms produce billions of natural products with unique chemical and physical properties. Some of them have been used in traditional therapy for specific diseases since ancient times. Although their exact chemical structures have yet to be elucidated clearly in that time, investigations in medicinal chemistry have been well documented. Furthermore, utilizing natural products in drug design and development offers advantages such as high biocompatibility, low toxicity, fewer side effects, wide bioactivities, and large structure diversity. Nowadays, rational drug research using computer-aided drug design is well established to cut the long way of drug discovery and overcome the resistance cases and the increment in the number of active patients. This review will highlight some natural products to comprehensively understand their journey from unknown natural produc...

Natural Products as a Foundation for Drug Discovery

Current Protocols in Pharmacology, 2001

Natural products have contributed to the development of many drugs for diverse indications. While most U.S. pharmaceutical companies have reduced or eliminated their in-house natural product groups, new paradigms and new enterprises have evolved to carry on a role for natural products in the pharmaceutical industry. Many of the reasons for the decline in popularity of natural products are being addressed by the development of new techniques for screening and production. This overview aims to inform pharmacologists of current strategies and techniques that make natural products a viable strategic choice for inclusion in drug discovery programs.

Natural Products: Source of Potential Drugs

Natural products isolated from various sources especially derived from plants, have long been used in treatment of human ailments. For long time, the approach to new drugs through natural products was proved to be the single most successful strategy for the discovery of new drugs. Despite the initial success, chemical diversity and specific action on target, drug discovery from natural products, has been deemphasized by many pharmaceutical companies in favour of approaches based on combinatorial chemistry and genomics. Besides covering the historical notes and the drugs already isolated from different natural sources like plants, fungi, marine organisms and animals, this review article is also presenting the reasons for the leg back in the field. Natural products have a large unexplored range of compounds, which is almost impossible to imitate; they will always remain a potential source of future drug discovery.

The value of natural products to future pharmaceutical discovery

Natural Product Reports, 2007

Natural products have provided considerable value to the pharmaceutical industry over the past half century. In particular, the therapeutic areas of infectious diseases and oncology have benefited from numerous drug classes derived from natural product sources. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies have significantly decreased activities in natural product discovery during the past several years. Biotechnology companies working in the fields of combinatorial biosynthesis, genetic engineering and metagenomic approaches to identify novel natural product lead molecules have had limited success. Despite what appears to be a slow death of natural product discovery research, many new and interesting molecules with biological activity have been published in the past few years. If natural product materials continue to be tested for desirable therapeutic activities, we believe that significant progress in identifying new antibiotics, oncology therapeutics and other useful medicines will be made.

Natural products for human health: an historical overview of the drug discovery approaches

Natural Product Research, 2017

Natural products (NPs) are secondary metabolites produced and used by organisms for defending or adapting purposes. These molecules were naturally selected during thousands of years to improve the specificity and cover a very wide range of functions, depending on the origin, the habitat and the specific activity carried out in the organism of origin. Due to these intrinsic features, NPs have been used as healing agents since thousands of years and still today continue to be the most important source of new potential therapeutic preparations.The purpose of this review is to provide information about the historical evolution of the NPs investigation methods, focusing attention on the relative benefit/problems emerged after the improvement of the scientific investigations about them, especially over the last two centuries. Taken together, the reported information lead to the central role of NPs in the future of drug development for human needs. 1. Natural products (NPs) Natural Products (NPs) are compounds derived from natural sources, e.g. plants, animals and microorganisms , which have biological activities (Baker et al. 2007). Plant NPs are also known as secondary metabolites, which are the end-products of the gene expression, generally not essential for the reproduction, the growth or the development of the plant and produced