Natural Products: Drug Development

The importance of natural products for medicine and health has been enormous. Due to diverse biological activities and medicinal potentials of natural products, nearly every civilization has accumulated experience and knowledge of their use. During the last two decades, research aimed at exploiting natural products as a resource has seriously declined. This is in part due to the development of new technologies such as combinatorial chemistry, metagenomics and high-throughput screening. However, the new drug discovery approaches did not fulfilled the initial expectations. This has lead to a renewed interest in natural products, determined by the urgent need for new drugs, in particular to fight against infections caused by multi-resistant pathogens. Besides, 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. However, one of the greatest challenges is to identify natural compounds or naturally inspired compounds that can be combined to be effective against human diseases. Thus, the modern pharmaceutical researches today use powerful tools of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, synthetic and combinatorial chemistry for development of new candidature drug. The book NATURAL PRODUCTS-DRUG DEVELOPMENT provides the reader with recent information on drug discovery from natural sources and its development using modern pharmaceutical research tools. The contributors are eminent subject experts working in the field of product development from natural sources such as plants, animals or microorganisms. The most remarkable feature of this book is the biotechnological and pharmaceutical approaches and structure elucidation of active molecules. This book would cater the need of graduate and post graduate students pursuing their study in all branches of life-sciences, pharmaceutical sciences, researchers and scientists working in the laboratories and industries involved in natural product discovery.