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Cancer Drug Treatments from Natural Products

© David Olle

The role of natural products in drug discovery

Vast changes have taken place recently in the means by which pharmaceutical companies conduct drug discovery research. It is faster, more efficient, and much of it conducted automatically without human intervention. 2An example of this is combinatorial chemistry. Beginning with a simple compound, a large number of chemical groups are added sequentially to produce hundreds of novel compounds. These new compounds are then screened in vitro (test tube) for a range of biological activities. Promising compounds then undergo further laboratory tests in animals, and the few successful ones will enter into human clinical trials.

Where do natural products fit into modern drug discovery schemes? Natural products have formed the basis of traditional medicine systems for thousands of years. 1Modern medicine improves on this process by extracting and concentrating the active compound from the natural product. An inherent problem with the widespread use of many natural products, however, lies with harvesting and processing products that have low concentrations of active principles.

As I will illustrate below, pharmaceutical and biotech companies are primarily interested in natural compounds as a template or starting point for the synthesis of related compounds. After all, nature has already shown that these compounds have biological activity, so the chances for success are greater than from the use of highly speculative compounds. In addition to having improved characteristics over the natural compounds, the new synthetic analogs are patentable, and thereby provide exclusive markets for the companies.

The federal government's role in the search for natural products to treat cancer

Within the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis is the Natural Products Branch. 3In order to accomplish the large task of collecting promising plant, marine and microbial specimens (60,000 have been collected to date), the Branch has used five major contractors from the U.S., and many collaborative institutes and universities from foreign countries.

The specimens are extracted with an organic solvent and water. The extracts are then screened against 60 different tumor cell lines representing a large cross section of cancers. The screening process is in vitro, and involves measuring the degree of growth inhibition of the cancer cells by the natural product extracts.

The Natural Products Branch seeks to encourage the commercialization of natural products for cancer therapy. The organization provides access to its repository of natural specimens and screening programs to academic researchers, large pharmaceutical companies and small biotech companies.

The copyright of the article Cancer Drug Treatments from Natural Products in Cancer Treatment is owned by David Olle. Permission to republish Cancer Drug Treatments from Natural Products in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.