Natural products: an evolving role in future drug discovery

Abstract

The therapeutic areas of infectious diseases and oncology have benefited from abundant scaffold diversity in natural products, able to interact with many specific targets within the cell and indeed for many years have been source or inspiration for the majority of FDA approved drugs. The present review describes natural products (NPs), semi-synthetic NPs and NP-derived compounds that have undergone clinical evaluation or registration from 2005 to 2010 by disease area i.e. infectious (bacterial, fungal, parasitic and viral), immunological, cardiovascular, neurological, inflammatory and related diseases and oncology.