- Introduction
- History
- Natural Drug Leads
- Combinatorial Approach
- Discoveries
- Conclusion
- References
- Contact Us
The advantages of natural drug leads include a higher diversity of chemical compounds as well as more rigid compounds, which are more specific. Combinatorial approaches introduce more non-rigid bonds, lowering the specificity and making the lead less pure and effective. However, combinatorial methods allow for the rapid synthesis of many potentially active compounds using high throughput screening.
Despite advances in technology and understanding of biological systems, drug discovery is still a long process with low rate of new therapeutic discovery. Information on the human genome, its sequence and what it encodes has been hailed as a potential windfall for drug discovery, promising to virtually eliminate the bottleneck in therapeutic targets that has been one limiting factor on the rate of therapeutic discovery. However, data indicates that "new targets" as opposed to "established targets" are more prone to drug discovery project failure in general. There exists a pharmaceutical industry trend beginning at the turn of the twenty-first century and continuing today which finds more risk aversion in target selection among large pharmaceutical companies. Although combinatorial approaches have provided a new and effective way to discover drug leads, there still exists an abundance of natural organisms that have not been screened for potentially new leads. Therefore, we feel the search for new drugs from natural sources (bioprospecting) should be continued even with the advent of combinatorial methods to drug discovery.