Production platforms for the molecular pharming of alkaloid diversity
Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: The field of natural products research has been experiencing a renaissance of interest for quite some time now, led in large part by a combination of practical realities, exciting new discoveries, and the development of some intriguing new concepts. Chemical, agricultural, food, and personal care products industries have all benefited from this arena of research. Nonetheless, the drug development pipeline has probably benefited the most from our fascination with natural products, and largely because of the structural complexity and diversity of compounds biosynthesized by natural sources as compared with those compounds arising from strictly an organic synthesis origin. The notion that natural products provide a greater opportunity for drug discovery and development than pure synthetic approaches has also been argued for some time now and is evident in the results presented by Minami et al. (1) in a recent issue of PNAS. The recent reports by Newman et al. (2, 3) also clearly document how approximately two-thirds of the drugs developed over the last 25 years have been derived from or inspired by particular natural products. Feher and Schmidt (4) provided an additional compelling argument as to why natural products have served so well for drug development. These investigators reported that the structural complexity found in drugs, as measured by the average number of 2.3 chiral centers per drug molecule, more closely resembled that found in natural products (average of 6.2 chiral centers per molecule) than the relative flat molecules (0.4 chiral centers per compound) found in libraries prepared by synthetic, combinatorial means (Fig. 1).
Author: Joe Chappell
Institution: University of Kentucky
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1978523026