Drug Development Based on Natural Products

Throughout history, natural products have been a valuable source of biologically active compounds. According to statistics, nearly 2/3 of all drugs on the market from 1981 to 2019 are related to natural products in some degree. In the process of modern new drug research and development, natural products have been an indispensable source of new drug development and have been widely studied, which is because natural products have some characteristics different from synthetic molecules, such as scaffold diversity, structural complexity and higher molecular weight. In addition, natural product drugs also have the advantages of lower development costs and shorter development time. Therefore, natural products are widely studied for diseases such as infection, neurodegenerative disease, cancer, immune-related, liver and kidney diseases. Up to now, a variety of drugs derived from natural products have been approved for clinical use such as Reserpine,Vincristine Sulfate,Pilocarpine Hydrochloride. However, there are still many natural products with great research value that have not been fully explored.

Chemical structure of representative natural products approved for clinical use.
Alejandro GG, et al. Biomolecules. 2022, 12, 1202.

Natural products compound libraries are one of the best-selling compound library series of MedChemExpress (MCE). All compounds in these libraries have the characteristics of variety, large quantity and wide source. These compounds include a variety of structural types, such as sugars, glycosides, phenylpropanoids, quinones, flavonoids, terpenoids, steroids, alkaloids, phenols, acids and aldehydes. All natural products have clear source information and structural classification, which can be used for high-throughput screening (HTS) and high-content screening (HCS), as an effective research tool for drug development based on natural products.