Cited by 1,381Microbial Natural Products and BiosynthesisBioactive natural compoundsComputational Drug Discovery Methods

The role of natural product chemistry in drug discovery

Butler, Mark S.·2004·Journal of Natural Products

Abstract

Although traditionally natural products have played an important role in drug discovery, in the past few years most Big Pharma companies have either terminated or considerably scaled down their natural product operations. This is despite a significant number of natural product-derived drugs being ranked in the top 35 worldwide selling ethical drugs in 2000, 2001, and 2002. There were 15 new natural product-derived drugs launched from 2000 to 2003, as well as 15 natural product-derived compounds in Phase III clinical trials or registration at the end of 2003. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in natural product research due to the failure of alternative drug discovery methods to deliver many lead compounds in key therapeutic areas such as immunosuppression, anti-infectives, and metabolic diseases. To continue to be competitive with other drug discovery methods, natural product research needs to continually improve the speed of the screening, isolation, and structure elucidation processes, as well addressing the suitability of screens for natural product extracts and dealing with issues involved with large-scale compound supply.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1021/np040106y

Cites

113 of 113 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Natural products represent an available source of new drugs, drug leads and chemical entities.

    “Natural products represent an available source of new drugs, drug leads and chemical entities [11,12].”

    From Marine Natural Products: A Source of Novel Anticancer Drugs (2019) · cites this paper as [11]

  • Plants contain diverse components that are important sources of biologically active molecules, and essential oils have strong antifungal activity.

    “Among the natural products, plants contain diverse components that are important sources of biologically active molecules [50, 133, 134]. In fact, the activity of plant crude extracts against different microorganisms has been reported, that is, strong antifungal activity of some major components of essential oils [135, 136].”

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Butler, M. S.
Affiliations
MerLion Pharmaceuticals, 1 Science Park Road, The Capricorn #05-01, Singapore Science Park II, Singapore 117528
Corresponding author
Butler, Mark S.
Venue
Journal of Natural Products
Published
2004-11-23
Volume
67
Issue
12
Pages
2141-2153
ISSN
  • 0163-3864 (ISSN-L)
  • 1520-6025
OpenAlex
W2127597456
Cited by
1,381
References
113
Citations by year
2026: 32 · 2025: 52 · 2024: 63 · 2023: 66 · 2022: 66 · 2021: 79 · 2020: 77 · 2019: 81 · 2018: 77 · 2017: 80 · 2016: 74 · 2015: 81 · 2014: 93 · 2013: 86 · 2012: 64
FWCI
2.97
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Journal of Natural Products (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Pharmacology › Microbial Natural Products and Biosynthesis
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Bioactive natural compounds
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Computational Drug Discovery Methods
Keywords
natural products, drug discovery, natural product-derived drugs, pharmaceutical industry, natural product screening, natural product isolation, structure elucidation, natural extracts, lead compound identification, immunosuppression, anti-infective agents, metabolic disorders
MeSH terms
Biological Factors, Drug Industry, Drug Design, Molecular Structure, Combinatorial Chemistry Techniques

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review