Medicinal natural products: a biosynthetic approach (3rd edn)
John Mann reviews the new edition
About 20 years ago the pharmaceutical industry concluded that the days of drug discovery using biologically active natural products as models were over. This was in spite of the fact that most of the anticancer drugs at the time were natural products or analogues, and all but two of the classes of antibacterials were modelled on natural products. The pharmaceutical industry embarked upon a programme of discovery using vast libraries of compounds produced by automated (semi-random) synthesis coupled with fast throughput biological screening. This discovery process has been almost wholly unsuccessful and as a result the current pipeline of new drugs is limited. In consequence there has been a recent revival in interest in natural products as leads for drug discovery so this new third edition of Dewick's excellent textbook is most timely.
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