Abstract
Phytera is a young biopharmaceutical company with facilities in Copenhagen, Denmark; Sheffield, UK and Worcester, Massachusetts and with the mission of building the World’s premier natural products based drug discovery company. Our rationale is based on the role played by natural products as drugs or as lead molecules from which developed structure activity relationships has lead to a new drug. Cragg, et al1 in an analysis of new chemical entities entering the US approved drug market in the period 1983-1994 pointed out that 249 were either natural products or were derivatives or analogs of natural products. By contrast 286 new chemical entities entering the market in that decade owed their origin to chemical library screening or designed synthesis (Figure 1). This slight preponderance of synthetic origin must be viewed in the relative efforts in pharmaceutical research between medicinal and natural product chemistry. Most large pharmaceutical companies have at least ten fold more research effort devoted to medicinal chemistry then natural product discovery. If we look at the area of anti-infective therapy the absolute numbers favor the natural products. Here 59 new products for the decade have natural product parentage compared with 34 with medicinal chemistry.
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References
Cragg, G.M., Newman, D.J. and Snader, K.M. (1997) Natural Products in Drug Discovery and Development, J. Nat. Products, 60, pp52–60.
Wheeler, N.C., Jech K., Masters S., Brobst, S.W., Alvarado, A.B., Hoover, A.J. and Snader, K.M. (1991) Effects of Genetic, Epigenetic and Environmental Factors on Taxol Content in Taxus brevifolia and Related Species, J. Nat. Products, 55, pp432–440.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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McAlpine, J.B., Pazoles, C., Stafford, A. (1999). Phytera’s Strategy for the Discovery of Novel Anti-Infective Agents from Plant Cell Cultures. In: Bohlin, L., Bruhn, J.G. (eds) Bioassay Methods in Natural Product Research and Drug Development. Proceedings of the Phytochemical Society of Europe, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4810-8_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4810-8_13
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