Mother Nature's Medicine Cabinet

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Mother Nature's Medicine Cabinet

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=65654

When it comes to stocking pharmacy shelves with drugs to treat human

ills, Mother Nature still is the ultimate medicinal chemist, a study

scheduled for the March 23 issue of ACS' Journal of Natural

Products, a monthly publication, suggests.

In the study, the National Cancer Institute's J. Newman and

Gordon M. Craig conclude that only 30 percent of the critically

important 'new chemical entities (NCEs)' introduced between 1981 and

mid-2006 were synthetic and not based on a naturally-occurring

compound. NCEs are totally new drugs, never before available, rather

than modified versions of existing medications sometimes termed 'me-

too' drugs. The remaining 70 percent of the NCEs introduced during

the last 25 years were natural products - medicines obtained from

sources such as plants and animals, derived from natural products or

chemically designed to mimic natural products.

Natural products range from aspirin (originally obtained from the

willow tree) to taxol, the anti-cancer drug discovered in the

Pacific yew tree. About half of all anti-cancer drugs introduced

since the 1940s are either natural products or medicines derived

directly from natural products, the study notes.

The new review of natural products' role as sources of new drugs is

an expanded and updated version of reports published in 1997 and

2003. " We strongly advocate expanding, not decreasing, the

exploration of Nature as a source of novel active ingredients that

may serve as the leads and scaffolds for elaboration into

desperately needed efficacious drugs for a multitude of disease

indications, " the study concludes.