Recently many research have come out with extracts from natural products. Big pharma companies have research department focusing on searching therapeutical drugs from natural resorces such as plants and microorganisms. Still there are many more biodiversity unexplored by humans. One factor that stop pharma companies from going into natural products is the slow discovery of lead compounds and synthethic drugs seems to be a more investment friendly approach for them. Do you think natural products will be able to compete with synthethic drugs or other methods of drug discovery? DIscuss

Not only alternative or traditional medicie but all drugs found from natrals products. Example is penicillin antibiotic. It was extracted from the bacterium penicillium.

To discover other drugs such as anticancer, anti tumor drugs, many researches have been carried out to screen and assayed their potency towards cancer/tumor cells.

How come you are the only one replying? Is this topic too boring or LYN forumer only interested in stuff like spaceship/alien and other things that take 100 yrs later to achieve?

current issues not interested?

This review is an updated and expanded version of two prior reviews that were published in this journal in 1997 and 2003. In the case of all approved agents the time frame has been extended to include the 251/2 years from 01/1981 to 06/2006 for all diseases worldwide and from 1950 (earliest so far identified) to 06/2006 for all approved antitumor drugs worldwide. We have continued to utilize our secondary subdivision of a “natural product mimic” or “NM” to join the original primary divisions. From the data presented, the utility of natural products as sources of novel structures, but not necessarily the final drug entity, is still alive and well. Thus, in the area of cancer, over the time frame from around the 1940s to date, of the 155 small molecules, 73% are other than “S” (synthetic), with 47% actually being either natural products or directly derived therefrom. In other areas, the influence of natural product structures is quite marked, with, as expected from prior information, the antiinfective area being dependent on natural products and their structures. Although combinatorial chemistry techniques have succeeded as methods of optimizing structures and have, in fact, been used in the optimization of many recently approved agents, we are able to identify only one de novo combinatorial compound approved as a drug in this 25 plus year time frame. We wish to draw the attention of readers to the rapidly evolving recognition that a significant number of natural product drugs/leads are actually produced by microbes and/or microbial interactions with the “host from whence it was isolated”, and therefore we consider that this area of natural product research should be expanded significantly.

Recently many research have come out with extracts from natural products. Big pharma companies have research department focusing on searching therapeutical drugs from natural resorces such as plants and microorganisms. Still there are many more biodiversity unexplored by humans. One factor that stop pharma companies from going into natural products is the slow discovery of lead compounds and synthethic drugs seems to be a more investment friendly approach for them. Do you think natural products will be able to compete with synthethic drugs or other methods of drug discovery? DIscuss

To help you understand more about natural products here is a review

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/np068054v

Yes something like lynn said. And for current untreatable disease such as AIDS and mainly cancer, there are still many unexplored natural resouces in our world that could provide the cure. Current synthethic drugs are derived from know chemical structure. They can only synthesize cheaper drugs when they know the chemical sturcuture of a known drug.

If you look at current research in marine organisms especially the deep sea, many microorganisms provide useful compounds that were not known before.

Can you give me your friend's contact? I wanna get in touch with them since they are in this field.

Yes something like lynn said. And for current untreatable disease such as AIDS and mainly cancer, there are still many unexplored natural resouces in our world that could provide the cure. Current synthethic drugs are derived from know chemical structure. They can only synthesize cheaper drugs when they know the chemical sturcuture of a known drug.

If you look at current research in marine organisms especially the deep sea, many microorganisms provide useful compounds that were not known before.