Natural products have played a vital role in drug discovery and development as chemical therapeutics across all diseases category. We can’t find a single disease area in which there is no drug originated from natural product. Most of the drugs that we presently use and most of the lead molecules that are in currently clinical trials are either natural products or their derivative and mimics. Moreover, most of the flora and fauna has not yet screened or studied for their active components and only ~10% of the entire life forms have been screened so far for their chemical composition. Thus there seems a huge potential in this field of chemistry and further exploration of remaining flora & fauna (~90%) may eventually end up with the discovery of wonder drugs that may be useful to cure problematic and incurable diseases like cancer, hepatitis, HIV etc.In the past, research in the field of Natural product chemistry had been hampered by certain drawbacks such as limited supply of material, tedious extraction methods, low yields and complex structure elucidation. However recent advances made in the field of Genomics, Tissue engineering and Analytical techniques have thrown new light on Natural product chemistry. Genomics made us understanding biosynthetic pathways of organisms at gene level in producing natural products. Genomics combined with fermentation facilitate us to produce natural products in large quantities without harming Nature by simply mimicking biosynthetic pathways in the laboratory.
The following salient features adapted from the above review underscore the prominence of natural products in drug discovery and development (the time frame covered in this review is the 30 years from 01/01/1981 - 12/31/2010).
1. Among the 1355 New Chemical Entities (NCEs) covering all diseases/countries/sources in the years 1981-2010, 71% were natural products, thus demonstrating the influence of natural products on drug discovery and approval.
2. In the antibacterial category, ~75% small molecules approved in this time period, either direct natural products or natural products derivatives and moreover six small-molecule drugs were approved in the antibacterial area from 01/2006 to 12/2010 all are natural product derivatives.
3. In anticancer drug area, there were 128 NCEs in total, with the number of natural products being 99 (77%).
4. In the category of antiinfectives, ~68% small molecules are synthetic in origin and remaining are from natural products or their analogues.
The above statistics once again clearly demonstrated the influence of natural products on drug discovery as potential drugs across all type of chemical therapeutics and there is huge potential that has to be exploited in this area as only 10-15% of all living organisms so far have been explored for their healing properties.
