Fifty years of drug discovery from fungi

Abstract

For the past 50 years, fungal secondary metabolites have revolutionized medicine yielding blockbuster drugs and drug leads of enormous therapeutic and agricultural potential. Since the discovery of penicillin, the first β-lactam antibiotic, fungi provided modern medicine with important antibiotics for curing life threatening infectious diseases. A new era in immunopharmacology and organ transplantation began with the discovery of cyclosporine. Other important drugs or products for agriculture derived from or inspired by natural products from fungi include statins, echinocandins and strobilurins. Moreover, fungal biotransformation of steroids for the industrial production of steroidal hormones represents one of the key successes in biotechnology. Given that estimations of fungal biodiversity exceed by far the number of already identified species, chances to find hitherto unidentified fungal species and novel bioactive fungal products are still high. Thus, further compounds with medicinal or agricultural potential from less investigated fungal taxa can be expected in the years to come.

The natural anti-tubercular agents: In silico study of physicochemical, pharmacokinetic and toxicological properties

“…Multidrug resistant strains of M. tuberculosis demands new drugs to restrain the spreading control of tuberculosis. The natural system always serve as a repository and generally mankind always looks into actinomycetes (Mahajan et al, 2011;Adegboye and Babalola, 2013;Patel et al, 2014), fungi (Smith and Ryan 2009;Aly et al, 2011), cyanobactria (Singh et al, 2011) and plants (Abdallah, 2011;Katiyar et al, 2012) for the new drug candidates. Numerous drugs and chemical agents have already been identified and the identification process is still on ongoing.…”

Antimicrobial evaluation of endophytic fungi extracts isolated from Casearia sylvestris

“…Endophytes provide an abundant reservoir of bioactive metabolites for medicinal exploitation, and an increasing number of novel compounds are being isolated from endophytic fungi. The endophytic fungi natural products present a broad spectrum of activities such as antimicrobial (Aly et al, 2011), antioxidant (Jalgaonwala et al, 2017), immunosuppressive properties, antivirals (Strobel, et al, 2003), anticholinesterase (Aly et al, 2011), antineoplasic (Zhang et al, 2006;Shweta et al, 2010) and cytotoxic activities (Aly et al, 2011). Some studies have shown that endophytic fungi can produce many important bioactive secondary metabolites, such as Taxol (R) from the endophytic fungus Taxomyces andreanae and vincristine isolated from the endophytic fungus Fusarium oxysporum, which are important anticancer drugs.…”

Potential of agricultural fungicides for antifungal drug discovery

“…Various fungi are also used for biotransformation of steroids that have been extensively used in medicine. [3][4][5] Currently, microorganisms are used for synthesis of nanoparticles within green nanotechnology; biosynthesis of gold, silver, gold-silver alloy, selenium, tellurium, platinum, palladium, silica, titania, zirconia, quantum dots, magnetite and uraninite nanoparticles by Aspergillus sp., Colletotrichum sp., Fusarium sp., Neurospora sp., Penicillium sp., Phoma sp., Trichoderma sp., Verticillium sp., yeasts and other fungal species has been reported. [6,7] Fungi are ubiquitous in nature and vital for recycling of nutrients contained in organic matter.…”