Impulse Lecture: The potential of natural products in drug discovery – What is the challenge in academia?

For more than a century bioactive natural products have served as molecular tools for biochemists and as inspiration for pharmacologists and medicinal chemists. Many prescribed drugs have directly or indirectly been discovered in natural product research1. However, with the rise of high-throughput screening technologies and the demand for huge synthetic compound libraries, as well as the more recent indroduction of biologics (e.g. therapeutic monoclonal antibodies), the interest in natural product research has declined in industry2. At the same time, the number of new chemical entities has declined too. While there are still some potentially interesting bioactive plant and animal natural products the chemical diversity of microorganisms (both terrestrial and marine) remains largely unknown. In the last decade, new academic initiatives have been realized to study natural products as potential lead structures or e.g. also to validate traditional herbal medicines3. Thus, academia is increasingly taking over natural product research. Academic research with natural products has led to thousands of scientific papers, describing actual or potential therapeutic uses. Unfortunately, only very few have triggered the development of innovative biochemical tool compounds or new drugs. The reasons for this are manyfold. In order to be successful, natural product research in academia should take advantage of the new developments in industry (high-content screening, promising targets, chemoinformatics, molecular library design, etc.) and combine the strength of „academic freedom“ with the scrutinity of industrial selection.

References: 1. D.J. Newman & G.M. Cragg, Natural products as sources of new drugs over the last 25 years. J. Nat. Prod,. 2007, 70: 461–77.

2. J.V. Li & JW Vederas, Drug discovery and natural products: end of an era or an endless frontier? Science, 2009, 325: 161–5.

3. J. Gertsch. How scientific is the science in ethnopharmacology? Historical perspectives and epistemological problems. J. Ethnopharmacol. 2009, 122:177–83.