Hormone steroid, potential source

The chemist Russel Marker conducted an intense search in the 1940s in Mexico for a steroidal natural product that could be used to prepare some of the hormonal steroids. His research soon centered on the Mexican wild yam Dioscorea villosa as a potential source of those compounds. Treating the saponin dioscin (7-1) with mild acid, he found, gave the aglycone diosgenin (7-2) (Scheme 2.7). 

Due to its content of sapogenins, particularly diosgenin, fenugreek seed is a potential source of sapogenins for the manufacture of steroid hormones andrelated drugs. Because it... 

Again, the answer should be fairly obvious. The potential therapeutic value of the steroid hormones makes these of tremendous commercial value. The commercial market for these is of the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. There is no comparable market for sterols and bile salts. We are faced with the interesting situation, therefore, that sterols are relatively abundant in natural sources but of relatively low commercial value, whilst steroids occur naturally at very low concentrations but are of great commercial value. Although there are tremendous variations amongst different products, steroids with desirable properties command market prices that are (ten to one thousand fold) greater than their sterol counterparts. 

Steroids are animal hormones. However, their potential as pharmaceutical products could not have been realized while their manufacture depended on methods such as the extraction of estrone (13) from the urine of pregnant mares Cholesterol (14) and bile acids were better sources, but one of the initial steps in the requisite conversion involved oxidation with chromic acid, a transformation which was not efficient. Not until Marker realized in the early 1940s that progesterone (15) and testosterone (16) could be readily synthesized from diosgenin (17), a plant steroid obtained from a... 

---