ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses around three broad themes: a journey through time to recapitulate the past successes of natural products, an examination of the distinguishing features of natural products and synthetic drugs, and current and future trends of the mutually beneficial partnership between combinatorial chemistry and natural products. The pharmaceutical and biotech industries had espoused combinatorial chemistry for over a decade and poured billions of dollars into its implementation. The chapter also discusses the unique properties of natural products and synthetic compounds. By the 19th century, organic chemistry had advanced to the stage of isolating the active principle from complex natural product extracts. Crude natural product extracts were a major source of samples for high-throughput screening campaigns. Although both natural products and trade drugs may converge on the same objective of biological activity, they operate in almost parallel universes in chemical space.
