Review reports that many pharma companies have eliminated their natural product research programs in the past decade, while from 2001 to 2008 there was a 30 percent drop in the number of natural product-based drugs undergoing clinical studies.
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Although the majority of drugs available today have been derived from natural products, research into nature-based pharmaceuticals has declined in recent years due to high development costs and the drug approvals process. However this trend is likely to reverse due to new approaches and technologies, according researchers from the University of Alberta.
“Untapped biological resources, ‘smart screening’ methods, robotic separation with structural analysis, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology offer exciting technologies for new natural product drug discovery,” write Jesse Li and John Vederas in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. “Advances in rapid genetic sequencing, coupled with manipulation of biosynthetic pathways, may provide a vast resource for the future discovery of pharmaceutical agents.”
 Rosy periwinkle in Madagascar. Two drugs derived from rosy periwinkle are used for treating Hodgkin’s lymphoma and childhood leukemia. Photo by Julie Larsen Maher. |
The authors note that a return to nature-based pharmaceuticals holds much promise: in 1990 about 80 percent of drugs were either natural products or inspired by them.
“Antibiotics (e.g., penicillin, tetracycline, erythromycin), antiparasitics (e.g., avermectin), antimalarials (e.g., quinine, artemisinin), lipid control agents (e.g., lovastatin and analogs), immunosuppressants for organ transplants (e.g., cyclosporine, rapamycins) and anticancer drugs (e.g., taxol, doxorubicin) revolutionized medicine,” they write. “Although the expansion of synthetic medicinal chemistry in the 1990s caused the proportion of new drugs based on natural products to drop to ~50% (Fig. 1), 13 natural product–derived drugs were approved in the United States between 2005 and 2007, with five of them being the first members of new classes.”
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