Natural Product Collaborative Drug Discovery

A library of about 7000 natural SMs from Novartis and the Natural Product Collaborative Drug Discovery Group was screened in an attempt to discover an inhibitor of Tcf/p-catenin interaction, implicated in colorectal and other cancer types. Six potent inhibitors of microbial origin were identified and suggested for further structural refinement for cancer therapy. However, an additional screen of approximately 45,000 synthetic compounds from the Novartis collection yielded no additional inhibitors of this interaction [22]. 

Baker JT, Borris RP, Carte B, Cordell GA, Soejarto DD, Cragg GM, Gnpta MP, Iwu MM, MaduUd DR, Tyler VE. (1995) Natural products drug discovery and development New perspectives on international collaboration. J Nat Prod 5% 1325-1357. 

Paul F Long is a molecular microbiologist whose research sits at the interface of chemistry, biology and clinical pharmaceutics. He has worked in natural product drug discovery in both the health service and pharmaceutical industry, as well as more recently in academia with international collaborations spanning Europe, Japan, the USA and Australia. His interests extend to applying pharmacogenomics to problems in paediatric clinical pharmacy from the use of natural product-derived therapeutics. 

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