Natural products are compounds that occur naturally in plants, animals and microorganisms and play an important role in the cosmetics, food and nutrition industries.
Natural products and their derivatives also occupy an extremely important position in the field of drug discovery, since the 1940s, nearly 75% of newly discovered small molecule anticancer drugs are related to natural products, between 1998 and 2004, 21 natural product derivatives were marketed in Western countries, and in the following five years, 19 natural product derivatives were approved. These include: paclitaxel, an anti-cancer agent derived from the Pacific yew tree; Derived from the salicylic acid derivative aspirin found in willow leaves.
Tens of millions of years of evolution have made natural products have better biological activity.
In the field of drug development, the exploration and screening of natural products remains a very important research and development driver, because they tend to have a wide range of novel and exploitable structural motifs. Examples include research on Marine natural products as potential antimicrobials and plant extracts as antifungals. However, compared with combinatorial chemistry, the acquisition difficulty of natural products and analogues is relatively higher, which needs to face the problems of difficult separation and extraction, limited extraction amount and complex synthesis route.
As a result, the number of commercially available natural products and analogues is much lower than that of conventional drug compounds, and the price of rare natural products is very expensive, which also limits the ability of natural product drug screening.