Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "Natural Products"

• Natural Products

  Natural Products: Always Coming Back

  11 July, 2017

  I get asked fairly often about natural products in drug discovery – it’s a topic that appeals to reporters and the general public, since the idea of pulling some sort of cure out of the rain forest or a deep-sea coral is interesting and dramatic. (Of course, some of the natural product cures have come… Read More

• Drug Assays

  Cryptic Natural Products Appearing

  3 July, 2017

  I last wrote about “cryptic natural products” here – this is the idea that there must be a great many interesting compounds produced by microorganisms that we have not seen yet. It’s for sure that there are many biosynthetic-looking gene clusters found in these species that don’t seem to be turned on most of the… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  NMR Continues to Bear Down on Structures

  10 April, 2017

  Determining the structure of a new molecule is one of those things that you’d think would be simple – at least, nonscientists often seem surprised at how much of our time we spend on such problems. (It doesn’t help that dramatic depictions involving chemistry almost invariably skip over this problem in the interest of moving the… Read More

• Chemical News

  Modifying Natural Products, And How

  1 March, 2017

  The field of late-stage modification of complex structures has seen several advances in the last few years, and this is just the sort of thing that medicinal chemists tend to be interested in. We like one-step transformations (which organic chemist doesn’t!) and we tend to have large collections of compounds that have already been made. Read More

• Chemical Biology

  Curcumin Will Waste Your Time

  12 January, 2017

  I really enjoyed reading this article in J. Med. Chem. on curcumin. (Update: here’s the take over at Practical Fragments). That’s a well-known natural product, found in large quantities in turmeric root (which is where most of the yellow color comes from). It has, over the years, been a hit in many, many assays, and… Read More

• Chemical News

  Maoecrystal V: You Poor People

  27 July, 2016

  The virtues and shortcomings of total synthesis are both on display in this new paper from the Baran group at Scripps, “Total Synthesis of Maoecrystal V”. Actually, they’re on display in not only that paper, but in it and in the four previous total syntheses of the molecule, but we’ll get to that. Maoecrystal is… Read More

• Drug Assays

  Drugs from Fungi, Or Fungi As Drugs?

  6 June, 2016

  This is an interesting article, but a lay reader would probably not realize how many important things are left out of it. It’s about a mushroom grower (Tradd Cotter) who’s been studying ways to protect his desired fungi against other pathogens, and who has an idea about extending this work to human therapies. He’s co-culturing… Read More

• Cancer

  Antibiotics: Not As Easy As They Say

  18 November, 2015

  Since we were just talking yesterday about antibiotics and the misconceptions that people have about them, this is an appropriate time to take a look at an article in the popular press about antibiotic discovery. (Vice.com counts as “popular press”, for sure). The article focuses on the work of Brian Murphy at UI-Chicago, who’s do… Read More

• Chemical News

  Screen Carefully

  11 November, 2015

  This recent paper asks the question “Can Invalid Bioactives Undermine Natural-Product Based Drug Discovery?” And as any of you who’ve done any natural product screening can attest, the answer is “You betcha”. There are any number of natural products (here’s one!) that, although active in a given screening assay,… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Case For Non-Biogenic Tramadol

  19 October, 2015

  The battle over whether tramadol is a natural product or not has been a heated one. Over the last couple of years, it was reported to be produced by a west African shrub, then this was reported to be an artifact of feeding the drug to cattle, and then this hypothesis was challenged by work… Read More