Abstract
The natural product specialized metabolites produced by microbes and plants are the backbone of our current drugs. Despite their historical importance, few pharmaceutical companies currently emphasize their exploitation in new drug discovery and instead favour synthetic compounds as more tractable alternatives. Ironically, we are in a Golden Age of understanding of natural product biosynthesis, biochemistry and engineering. These advances have the potential to usher in a new era of natural product exploration and development taking full advantage of the unique and favourable properties of natural products compounds in drug discovery.
Highlights
The natural product specialized metabolites produced by microbes and plants are the backbone of our current drugs
Humans have turned to the natural world surrounding them for medicines to treat a range of conditions from infections to gastric disorders to pain management to psychiatric syndromes
Microbial natural products have proven especially effective as antibiotics and antifungals, e.g., penicillin, amphotericin, etc., and as anticancer drugs, e.g. doxorubicin, immune-suppressing agents, e.g. rapamycin, cholesterol-lowering medicines, e.g. lovastatin, and antiparasitics, e.g., avermectin (Walsh and Tang, 2017)
Summary
These include stability to host biochemistry and targeting of specific tissues, and extension of the receptor range beyond those targeted by natural selection Despite their proven efficacy in drug discovery and development, the past 30 years have seen a steady decline in the number of new natural product-derived medicines entering into clinical use. Changes in the process of drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry in the 1980s and 90s saw a shift to automated assays enabling high throughput screening of thousands to millions of drug candidates This change required equal access to vast libraries of compounds that could be created with new synthetic strategies such as combinatorial chemistry, but not by traditional natural product extracts of plant or microbiological samples. This revelation has the potential to be a game-changer for natural products in medicine over the decades (Wright, 2017)
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