Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12673

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Publication type: Journal Article

Baker DD, Chu M, Oza U, Rajgarhia V.
The value of natural products to future pharmaceutical discovery.
Nat Prod Rep 2007 Dec; 24:(6):1225-44
http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/NP/article.asp?doi=b602241n

Abstract:

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.

Keywords:
Amino Acid Sequence Anti-Infective Agents/chemistry Anti-Infective Agents/isolation & purification Anti-Infective Agents/pharmacology Antineoplastic Agents/chemistry Antineoplastic Agents/isolation & purification Antineoplastic Agents/pharmacology Biological Products*/chemistry Biological Products*/classification Biological Products*/isolation & purification Biological Products*/pharmacology Drug Industry/trends* Molecular Sequence Data Molecular Structure