Environmental Microbiology, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Inhoffenstrasse 7, D-38124, Braunschweig, Germany.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2009;655:13-27. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4419-1132-2_2.
Natural products and their derivatives have been and continue to be rich sources for drug discovery. However, natural products are not drugs. They are produce in nature and through biological assays they are identified as leads, which become candidates for drug development. More than 60% of the drugs that are in the market derive from natural sources. During the last two decades, research aimed at exploiting natural products as a resource has seriously declined. This is in part due to the development of new technologies such as combinatorial chemistry, metagenomics and high-throughput screening. However, the new drug discovery approaches did not fulfilled the initial expectations. This has lead to a renewed interest in natural products, determined by the urgent need for new drugs, in particular to fight against infections caused by multi-resistant pathogens.
天然产物及其衍生物一直是药物发现的重要来源，并且将继续发挥重要作用。然而，天然产物并非药物，它们是在自然界中产生的，通过生物检测，它们被鉴定为先导化合物，从而成为药物开发的候选物。市场上 60%以上的药物都来源于天然物质。在过去的二十年中，旨在利用天然产物作为资源的研究严重减少。这在一定程度上是由于新的技术的发展，如组合化学、宏基因组学和高通量筛选。然而，新药发现方法并没有达到最初的预期。这导致人们对天然产物重新产生了兴趣，因为人们迫切需要新的药物，特别是需要对抗由多耐药病原体引起的感染。
