Bioactive Natural Products: Opportunities and Challenges in Medicinal Chemistry

695 Pages·2012·9.83 MB·English

by  Goutam Brahmachari

BIOACTIVE

NATURAL PRODUCTS
Opportunities and Challenges in Medicinal Chemistry

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BIOACTI V E

NATURAL PRODUCTS
Opportunities and Challenges in Medicinal Chemistry
editor
Goutam Brahmachari
Visva-Bharati University, India

World Scientific
NEW JERSEY • LONDON • SINGAPORE • BEIJING • SHANGHAI • HONG KONG • TAIPEI • CHENNAI
8033hc.9789814335379-tp.indd 2 8/29/11 10:32 AM
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BIOACTIVE NATURAL PRODUCTS
Opportunities and Challenges in Medicinal Chemistry
Copyright © 2012 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
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ISBN-13 978-981-4335-37-9
ISBN-10 981-4335-37-1
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Printed in Singapore.
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To
All those who are working globally with
bioactive natural products for the cause of human
welfare

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Foreword
Unlike other books with a similar title, this edited volume covers not only
secondary metabolites from natural product sources and their derivatives,
but also a significant amount of what might best be covered under the
rubric of alternative medicine or even functional food stuffs. In addition,
it also contains excellent chapters on the methodologies of production of
“natural products that will be drug molecules in their own right”. Thus
there are chapters by well-known experts on not only classical fermenta-
tion processes using microbes, but also on the methodologies involved in
plant tissue culture. This latter system is one that is not often referred to
for drug production, but over the last 5+ years, it has become a major
method for the production of the antitumor drug Taxol® by BristolMyers
Squibb.
Apoint that is often forgotten in westernized medicine is that of the
approximate 7 billion people in the world at this moment, more than 80%
of them do not have routine access to drugs as they are defined in Western
medicine, but rely upon predominately plant-based therapies as their
sources of medicinal agents. Even in areas of the world where single agent
drugs are available, traditional therapeutic regimens such as Ayurveda in
India, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Japanese and Korean herbals are
still the major source of medicinals.
Thus in this volume, as a result of a careful juxtaposition of what
might be called “classical natural product-based drug discovery” where
pure single compounds or their close chemical relatives, are used as eth-
ical pharmaceutical agents, with commentaries on the history and use of
agents found in “functional foods and alternative therapies”, the reader
will have a more nuanced understanding of the role that natural
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viii Foreword
products, in the widest sense of the term, has had upon the discovery and
development of agents — be they single agents, or validated mixtures,
that can be utilized to maintain the health of people from all areas of
the world.
David J. Newman
Wayne, Pennsylvania, USA
June, 2011
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Preface
This single volume entitled Bioactive Natural Products: Opportunities &
Challenges in Medicinal Chemistryis an endeavor to underline how nat-
ural product research continues to make significant contributions in the
domain of discovery and development of new medicinal entities; the pres-
ent book brings together a total of fourteen articles contributed by eminent
natural product chemists from several countries in response to my per-
sonal invitation. I am most grateful to the authors for their generous and
timely response in spite of their busy and tight schedules with academics,
research, and other responsibilities.
Nature stands as an inexhaustible source of novel chemotypes and
pharmacophores; natural products present in the plant and animal king-
dom offer a large diversity of chemical structures which are the result
of biosynthetic processes that have been modulated over the millennia
through genetic effects. Interest in obtaining biologically active com-
pounds from natural sources has recently spiked due to their low
toxicity, availability from renewable sources, complete biodegradabil-
ity, and in most cases, low cost as well. Bioactive natural products are
proving to be a rich source of novel therapeutics. The search for bioac-
tive molecules from nature (plants, animals, microflora) continues to
play an important role in fashioning new medicinal agents. With the
advent of modern techniques, particularly the rapid improvements in
spectroscopic as well as accompanying advances in high-throughput
screening techniques, it has become possible to have an enormous
repository of bioactive natural compounds, thus opening up exciting
new opportunities in the field of new drug development to the pharma-
ceutical industry.
Medicinal chemistry of bioactive natural products spans a wide range
of fields, including isolation and characterization of bioactive compounds
from natural sources, structure modification for optimization of their
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