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"

• 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

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Tramadol Wars

  25 June, 2015

  You may recall the report of the synthetic analgesic tramadol as a natural product from Cameroon, and the subsequent report that it was nothing of the kind. (That’s the paper that brought the surprising news that local farmers were feeding the drug to their cows). Now the first group (a team from Nantes, Lodz, and… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Weirdly, Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

  15 September, 2014

  Last year I mentioned a paper that described the well-known drug tramadol as a natural product, isolated from a species of tree in Cameroon. Rather high concentrations were found in the root bark, and the evidence looked solid that the compound was indeed being made biochemically. Well, thanks to chem-blogger Quintus (and a mention on… Read More

• Diabetes and Obesity

  Speaking of Polyphenols. . .

  19 June, 2014

  Yesterday’s mention of “nightmare polyphenols” prompted a reader to ask about the one in this paper. That’s it over there at the left, and yeah, that sure is a polyphenol. In fact, it’s a chaetochromin, a family of mycotoxins originally isolated from moldy rice. The paper doesn’t say anything about its stereochem… Read More