Natural Products and Drug Discovery: An Integrated Approach provides an applied overview of the field, from traditional medicinal targets, to cutting-edge molecular techniques. Natural products have always been of key importance to drug discovery, but as modern techniques and technologies have allowed researchers to identify, isolate, extract and synthesize their active compounds in new ways, they are once again coming to the forefront of drug discovery. Combining the potential of traditional medicine with the refinement of modern chemical technology, the use of natural products as the basis for drugs can help in the development of more environmentally sound, economical, and effective drug discovery processes. Natural Products & Drug Discovery: An Integrated Approach reflects on the current changes in this field, giving context to the current shift and using supportive case studies to highlight the challenges and successes faced by researchers in integrating traditional medicinal sources with modern chemical technologies. It therefore acts as a useful reference to medicinal chemists, phytochemists, biochemists, pharma R&D professionals, and drug discovery students and researchers. - Reviews the changing role of natural products in drug discovery, integrating traditional knowledge with modern molecular technologies - Highlights the potential future role of natural products in preventative medicine - Supported by real world case studies throughout

Bioactive natural products are a rich source of novel therapeutics. Thus, the search for bioactive molecules from nature continues to play an important role in fashioning new medicinal agents. This volume, which comprises sixteen chapters written by active researchers and leading experts in natural products chemistry, brings together an overview of current discoveries in this remarkable field. It also provides information on the industrial application of natural products for medicinal purposes. This book will serve as a valuable resource for researchers to predict promising leads for developing pharmaceuticals to treat various ailments and disease manifestations.

A fresh examination of the past successes of natural products as medicines and their new future from both conventional and new technologies. High-performance liquid chromatography profiling, combinatorial synthesis, genomics, proteomics, DNA shuffling, bioinformatics, and genetic manipulation all now make it possible to rapidly evaluate the activities of extracts as well as purified components derived from microbes, plants, and marine organisms. The authors apply these methods to new natural product drug discoveries, to microbial diversity, to specific groups of products (Chinese herbal drugs, antitumor drugs from microbes and plants, terpenoids, and arsenic compounds), and to specific sources (the sea, rainforest, and endophytes). These new opportunities show how research and development trends in the pharmaceutical industry can advance to include both synthetic compounds and natural products, and how this paradigm shift can be more productive and efficacious.

Natural Products have been important sources of useful drugs from prehistoric times to the present. This book gives an overview about this field and provides important recent contributions to the discovery of new drugs generated by research on natural products. Total synthesis of natural products with interesting biological activities is paving the way for the preparation of new and improved analogs. The methods of combinatorial chemistry permit the selection of the best drug from a large number of candidates. Beyond synthesis and evaluation of organic molecules a number of new bioorganic methods are coming to the fore and will be discucced in this isue of the ERnst schering Research Foundation workshop proceedings.

This book describes the processes that are involved in the development of new drugs. The authors discuss the history, role of natural products and concept of receptor interactions with regard to the initial stages of drug discovery. In a single, highly readable volume, it outlines the basics of pharmacological screening, drug target identification, and genetics involved in early drug discovery. The final chapters introduce readers to stem therapeutics, pharmacokinetics, pharmacovigilance, and toxicological testing. Given its scope, the book will enable research scholars, professionals and young scientists to understand the key fundamentals of drug discovery, including stereochemistry, pharmacokinetics, clinical trials, statistics and toxicology.

Pharmaceutical Biotechnology is a unique compilation of reviews addressing frontiers in biologicals as a rich source for innovative medicines. This book fulfills the needs of a broad community of scientists interested in biologicals from diverse perspectives—basic research, biotechnology, protein engineering, protein delivery, medicines, pharmaceuticals and vaccinology. The diverse topics range from advanced biotechnologies aimed to introduce novel, potent engineered vaccines of unprecedented efficacy and safety for a wide scope of human diseases to natural products, small peptides and polypeptides engineered for discrete prophylaxis and therapeutic purposes. Modern biologicals promise to dramatically expand the scope of preventive medicine beyond the infectious disease arena into broad applications in immune and cancer treatment, as exemplified by anti-EGFR receptors antibodies for the treatment of breast cancer. The exponential growth in biologicals such as engineered proteins and vaccines has been boosted by unprecedented scientific breakthroughs made in the past decades culminating in an in-depth fundamental understanding of the scientific underpinnings of immune mechanisms together with knowledge of protein and peptide scaffolds that can be deliberately manipulated. This has in turn led to new strategies and processes. Deciphering the human, mammalian and numerous pathogens’ genomes provides opportunities that never before have been available—identification of discrete antigens (genomes and antigenomes) that lend themselves to considerably improved antigens and monoclonal antibodies, which with more sophisticated engineered adjuvants and agonists of pattern recognition receptors present in immune cells, deliver unprecedented safety and efficacy. Technological development such a nanobiotechnologies (dendrimers, nanobodies and fullerenes), biological particles (viral-like particles and bacterial ghosts) and innovative vectors (replication-competent attenuated, replication-incompetent recombinant and defective helper-dependent vectors) fulfill a broad range of cutting-edge research, drug discovery and delivery applications. Most recent examples of breakthrough biologicals include the human papilloma virus vaccine (HPV, prevention of women genital cancer) and the multivalent Pneumoccocal vaccines, which has virtually eradicated in some populations a most prevalent bacterial ear infection (i.e., otitis media). It is expected that in the years to come similar success will be obtained in the development of vaccines for diseases which still represent major threats for human health, such as AIDS, as well as for the generation of improved vaccines against diseases like pandemic flu for which vaccines are currently available. Furthermore, advances in comparative immunology and innate immunity revealed opportunities for innovative strategies for ever smaller biologicals and vaccines derived from species such as llama and sharks, which carry tremendous potential for innovative biologicals already in development stages in many pharmaceutical companies. Such recent discoveries and knowledge exploitations hold the promise for breakthrough biologicals, with the coming decade. Finally, this book caters to individuals not directly engaged in the pharmaceutical drug discovery process via a chapter outlining discovery, preclinical development, clinical development and translational medicine issues that are critical the drug development process. The authors and editors hope that this compilation of reviews will help readers rapidly and completely update knowledge and understanding of the frontiers in pharmaceutical biotechnologies.

Pharmacognosy is a term derived from the Greek words for drug (pharmakon) and knowledge (gnosis). It is a field of study within Chemistry focused on natural products isolated from different sources and their biological activities. Research on natural products began more than a hundred years ago and has continued up to now with a plethora of research groups discovering new ideas and novel active constituents. This book compiles the latest research in the field and will be of interest to scientists, researchers, and students.