Nature As Source of Drugs
Despite the rise of combinatorial chemistry as an integral part of lead discovery process, natural products still play a major role as starting material for drug discovery. A report was published in 2007, covering years 1981-2006 details the contribution of biologically occurring chemicals in drug development. According to this report, of the 974 small molecule new chemical entities, 63% were natural derived or semisynthetic derivatives of natural products. For certain therapy areas, such as antimicrobials, antineoplastics, antihypertensive and anti-inflammatory drugs, the numbers were higher. In many cases, these products have been used traditionally for many years.
Natural products may be useful as a source of novel chemical structures for modern techniques of development of antibacterial therapies.
Despite the implied potential, only a fraction of Earth’s living species has been tested for bioactivity.
Read more about this topic: Drug Discovery
Famous quotes containing the words nature, source and/or drugs:
“Most books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“If we became students of Malcolm X, we would not have young black men out there killing each other like they’re killing each other now. Young black men would not be impregnating young black women at the rate going on now. We’d not have the drugs we have now, or the alcoholism.”
—Spike Lee (b. 1956)