title: The value of natural products to future pharmaceutical discovery.
abstract: Natural products have provided considerable value to the pharmaceutical industry over the past half century. In particular, the therapeutic areas of infectious diseases and oncology have benefited from numerous drug classes derived from natural product sources. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies have significantly decreased activities in natural product discovery during the past several years. Biotechnology companies working in the fields of combinatorial biosynthesis, genetic engineering and metagenomic approaches to identify novel natural product lead molecules have had limited success. Despite what appears to be a slow death of natural product discovery research, many new and interesting molecules with biological activity have been published in the past few years. If natural product materials continue to be tested for desirable therapeutic activities, we believe that significant progress in identifying new antibiotics, oncology therapeutics and other useful medicines will be made.
authors.affiliation: Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 65 Hayden Avenue, Lexington, Massachusetts 02421, USA. dwight.baker@cubist.com
authors.forename: Dwight D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Baker
authors.forename: Min
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chu
authors.forename: Uma
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Oza
authors.forename: Vineet
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Rajgarhia
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000890:Anti-Infective Agents / Q000737:chemistry / Q000302:isolation & purification / Q000494:pharmacology; D000970:Antineoplastic Agents / Q000737:chemistry / Q000302:isolation & purification / Q000494:pharmacology; D001688:Biological Products / Q000737:chemistry / Q000145:classification / Q000302:isolation & purification / Q000494:pharmacology; D004345:Drug Industry / Q000639:trends*; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D015394:Molecular Structure
chemical_list: D000890:Anti-Infective Agents; D000970:Antineoplastic Agents; D001688:Biological Products