Role of Natural Products in Drug Discovery Process

Abstract

Natural products and their related moieties have historically been incredible as a source of therapeutic agents. In last 5-10 years, research into natural products in the pharmaceutical industry has reduced, owing to issues such as the lack of compatibility of traditional natural-product extract libraries with high-throughput screening. It has long been recognized that natural-product structures have the characteristics of high chemical diversity, biochemical specificity and other molecular properties that make them favourable as lead structures for drug discovery, and which serve to differentiate them from libraries of synthetic and combinatorial compounds. Recent advances in genomics and structural biology during the past decades are painting a clearer picture of the diversity of proteins targeted by natural-product molecules. Besides these, current lead generation strategies have led to a renewed interest in natural products in drug discovery