Screening of Natural Products
Pharmacognosy provides the tools to identify, select and process natural products destined for medicinal use. Usually, the natural product compound has some form of biological activity and that compound is known as the active principle - such a structure can act as a lead compound (not to be confused with compounds containing the element lead). Many of today's medicines are obtained directly from a natural source.
On the other hand, some medicines are developed from a lead compound originally obtained from a natural source. This means the lead compound:
- can be produced by total synthesis, or
- can be a starting point (precursor) for a semisynthetic compound, or
- can act as a template for a structurally different total synthetic compound.
This is because most biologically active natural product compounds are secondary metabolites with very complex structures. This has an advantage in that they are extremely novel compounds but this complexity also makes many lead compounds' synthesis difficult and the compound usually has to be extracted from its natural source - a slow, expensive and inefficient process. As a result, there is usually an advantage in designing simpler analogues.
Read more about this topic: Natural Product
Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or products:
“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation.”
—Dixie Lee Ray (b. 1924)