Phytera’s Strategy for the Discovery of Novel Anti-Infective Agents from Plant Cell Cultures

Abstract

Phytera is a young biopharmaceutical company with facilities in Copenhagen, Denmark; Sheffield, UK and Worcester, Massachusetts and with the mission of building the World’s premier natural products based drug discovery company. Our rationale is based on the role played by natural products as drugs or as lead molecules from which developed structure activity relationships has lead to a new drug. Cragg, et al1 in an analysis of new chemical entities entering the US approved drug market in the period 1983-1994 pointed out that 249 were either natural products or were derivatives or analogs of natural products. By contrast 286 new chemical entities entering the market in that decade owed their origin to chemical library screening or designed synthesis (Figure 1). This slight preponderance of synthetic origin must be viewed in the relative efforts in pharmaceutical research between medicinal and natural product chemistry. Most large pharmaceutical companies have at least ten fold more research effort devoted to medicinal chemistry then natural product discovery. If we look at the area of anti-infective therapy the absolute numbers favor the natural products. Here 59 new products for the decade have natural product parentage compared with 34 with medicinal chemistry.