ABSTRACT

National Center for Natural Products Research, Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Pharmacy, University of Mississippi, University, Mississippi 38677, U.S.A.

INTRODUCTION

Humans have used plant materials for medicines since before recorded time. These remedies consisted of whole plants or rather crude extracts until quite recently. In the last one hundred years or so humans began to purify natural compounds and to produce compounds synthetically for use as drugs. Despite all of the modern advances in synthetic techniques, knowledge of receptors, molecular modeling and database searching we are still dependent upon natural compounds as the basis for new drug discoveries. More than half of the small molecule "New Chemical Entities" (NCE) reported in the period of 1981-2002 were natural compounds, derivatives of natural compounds or synthetic compound whose structure was based upon a natural compound. Interestingly, during this same time period pharmaceutical companies deemphasized natural product screening in favor of combinatorial libraries and the number of NCE hit a twenty year low and is still declining (Newman et al. 2003).