Natural Products in Drug Discovery: Impacts and Opportunities — An Assessment

Abstract

Nature stands as an inexhaustible source of novel chemotypes and pharmacophores, and has been a source of medicinal agents for thousands of years, and an impressive number of modern drugs find their origin in natural products. Natural product chemistry has experienced explosive and diversified growth, making natural products the subject of much interest and promise in the present day research directed towards drug design and discovery. It is noteworthy that natural products are a source of new compounds with diversified structural arrangements possessing interesting biological activities. Natural products, thus, have played and continue to play an invaluable role in the drug discovery process. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in natural products research due to the failure of alternative drug discovery methods to deliver many lead compounds in key therapeutic areas such as immunosuppression, anti-infective, and metabolic diseases. However, continuing improvements in natural products research are needed to continue to be competitive with other drug discovery methods, and also to keep pace with the ongoing changes in the drug discovery process. Faithful drives are needed in a more intensified fashion to explore "Nature" as a source of novel and active agents that may serve as the leads and scaffolds for elaboration into urgently needed efficacious drugs for a multitude of disease indications. Natural products have provided considerable value to the pharmaceutical industry over the past half century. In particular, the therapeutic

Natural Products with Antischistosomal Activity

“…The discovery of pure compounds as active principles in plants was first described at the beginning of the 19th century, and the art of exploiting natural products has become part of the molecular sciences [17]. Natural products have come from various source materials including terrestrial plants, terrestrial microorganisms, marine organisms, and terrestrial vertebrates and invertebrates.…”

“…Many drugs are derived from plants and others that are synthetic analogues are built on prototype compounds isolated from plants. Atropine, aspirin, colchicine, digoxin, ephedrine, morphine, pilocarpine, reserpine, tubocurarine and vincristine are a few important examples of what medicinal plants have given us in the past [17,22]. In addition, the antiparasitic drugs artemisinin and chloroquine are examples of plant-derived products, and amphotericin B and ivermectin are important antiparasitics isolated from Streptomyces microorganisms.…”

“…Natural products are a source of compounds with diversified structural arrangements possessing interesting biological activities [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. This review attempts to update the antischistosomal natural compounds isolated from plants, or natural product-derived compounds, from the mid-1980s, the date when more formal and constant research on natural metabolites with schistosomicidal activity was initiated.…”

Antimicrobial Properties of Leptadenia Hastata (Pers) Decne Leaves Extract

“…A major focus of natural product in chemistry has been toward drug design and discovery. However, obtaining scientific proof for the biological activity of natural plants is still challenging [5,6].…”

Anticandidal activity of several plants used by Bentian tribe in East Kalimantan, Indonesia

“…The research activity in medicinal plants in Indonesia is limited to the inventory of folkloric information and utilization of various plants and trees. It means research into the scientific proof for their biological activity of the local medicinal plants is still challenging [1,2].…”