Full Description
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.
Contents
Fundamental Issues Related to Natural Product-Based Drug Delivery.- Natural Products and Drug Discovery.- Strategies.- Integrated Approaches for Discovering Novel Drugs From Microbial Natural Products.- Automated Analyses of HPLC Profiles of Microbial Extracts.- Manipulating Microbial Metabolites for Drug Discovery and Production.- Improving Drug Discovery From Microorganisms.- Developments in Strain Improvement Technology.- Specific Groups of Drugs.- The Discovery of Anticancer Drugs From Natural Sources.- Case Studies in Natural-Product Optimization.- Terpenoids As Therapeutic Drugs and Pharmaceutical Agents.- Challenges and Opportunities in the Chinese Herbal Drug Industry.- Arsenic Trioxide and Leukemia.- Microbial Diversity.- New Methods to Access Microbial Diversity for Small Molecule Discovery.- Accessing the Genomes of Uncultivated Microbes for Novel Natural Products.- Specific Sources.- New Natural-Product Diversity From Marine Actinomycetes.- Novel Natural Products From Rainforest Endophytes.- Biological, Economic, Ecological, and Legal Aspects of Harvesting Traditional Medicine in Ecuador.
