Discovery and resupply of pharmacologically active plant-derived natural products: A review
By A. Atanasov, B. Waltenberger, E. Pferschy-Wenzig, Thomas Linder, C. Wawrosch, P. Uhrin, V. Temml, Limei Wang, S. Schwaiger, E. Heiss and 9 more. Biotechnology Advances, 2015
2,567 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Medicinal plants have historically proven their value as a source of molecules with therapeutic potential, and nowadays still represent an important pool for the identification of novel drug leads. In the past decades, pharmaceutical industry focused mainly on libraries of synthetic compounds as drug discovery source. They are comparably easy to produce and resupply, and demonstrate good compatibility with established high throughput screening (HTS) platforms. However, at the same time there has been a declining trend in the number of new drugs reaching the market, raising renewed scientific interest in drug discovery from natural sources, despite of its known challenges. In this survey, a brief outline of historical development is provided together with a comprehensive overview of used approaches and recent developments relevant to plant-derived natural product drug discovery. Associated challenges and major strengths of natural product-based drug discovery are critically discussed. A snapshot of the advanced plant-derived natural products that are currently in actively recruiting clinical trials is also presented. Importantly, the transition of a natural compound from a “screening hit” through a “drug lead” to a “marketed drug” is associated with increasingly challenging demands for compound amount, which often cannot be met by re-isolation from the respective plant sources. In this regard, existing alternatives for resupply are also discussed, including different biotechnology approaches and total organic synthesis. While the intrinsic complexity of natural product-based drug discovery necessitates highly integrated interdisciplinary approaches, the reviewed scientific developments, recent technological advances, and research trends clearly indicate that natural products will be among the most important sources of new drugs also in the future.
Subfields: Molecular Biology, Pharmacology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f17b2e2ace348e18466e82d25200c71e9dd9936
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Citations in the corpus
- Cannabis sativa: The Plant of the Thousand and One Molecules (2016, background): “Continuously discovering new prototypes of drugs is of tremendous importance to meet tomorrow’s challenges in terms of public health (Atanasov et al., 2015).”
- Techniques for extraction and isolation of natural products: a comprehensive review (2018, background): “Natural products offer more drug-like features to molecules from combinatorial chemistry in terms of functional groups, chirality, and structural complexity [4, 5].”
- A Comprehensive Review on Medicinal Plants as Antimicrobial Therapeutics: Potential Avenues of Biocompatible Drug Discovery (2019, background): “The wide spread antibiotic resistance, which is observed currently, is causing public health concerns by medical researchers warning about a return to the pre-antibiotic era [22].”