Discovery and resupply of pharmacologically active plant-derived natural products: A review

Medicinal plants have historically proven their value as a source of molecules with therapeutic potential, and nowadays still represent an important pool for the identification of novel drug leads. In the past decades, pharmaceutical industry focused mainly on libraries of synthetic compounds as drug discovery source. They are comparably easy to produce and resupply, and demonstrate good compatibility with established high throughput screening (HTS) platforms. However, at the same time there has been a declining trend in the number of new drugs reaching the market, raising renewed scientific interest in drug discovery from natural sources, despite of its known challenges. In this survey, a brief outline of…

• AS
  Austrian Science Fund

  Awards: S10704, P25971-B23, S10706, S10702/S10711, S10709/10713, S10710, S10705, S10703
• ÖF
  Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft

  Award: 848474
• TW
  Tiroler Wissenschaftsförderung