Pharmaceutical industry drug sources

The pharmaceutical industry has employed materials of plant and animal origin as sources of drugs. The industry has utilized the life processes of either plants or animals and microorganisms to produce medicinal and antibiotic products. 

Caldum gluconate is one of the relatively few soluble caldum salts and is used in the pharmaceutical industry as a source of caldum for patients with caldum defidency. Many drugs are supplied as the gluconate derivatives. Other gluconates such as iron gluconate can be used, in this case to treat iron defidency. 

For thousands of years, nature has provided humankind with a large variety of materials for the most diversified applications for its survival, such as food, energy, medicinal products, protection and defense tools, and others. The pharmaceutical industry has benefitted from such diversity of biomaterials and has exploited the use of natural products as sources of both drugs and excipients. One example of a promising biomaterial for pharmaceutical use is xylan, a hemicellulose largely found in nature, being considered the second most abundant polysaccharide after cellulose. 

One advantage of whole-cell biotransformation that has not been addressed adequately in this chapter is the ability to modify compounds with complex structure, such as natural products. Natural products are ideal substrates for biotransformation reactions since they are synthesized in a series of enzymatic reactions by the whole cells. The modification of natural products by biotransformation has been reviewed recently by Azerad [ 13] and a majority of the modifications were carried out by whole-cell biotransformations. Additional examples of modification of natural products by whole-cell biotransformations can also be found in the review article by Patel [2]. Natural products are an important source of new drugs and new drug leads [53]. The use of biotransformation, especially whole-cell biotransformation, in modification of natural products for lead optimization and generating libraries of derivatives for S AR and screening studies is important for the pharmaceutical industry. 

Impurities in drug substances and drug products continue to be a source of great concern, discussion, debate, and research. " These concerns and debates typically center on the potential safety risks associated with impurities due to contamination and the setting of acceptance criteria. However, the bulk of the work being performed in the pharmaceutical industry, with respect to impurities, is focused on the isolation, identification, qualification and quantification of impurities that are found as a result of the manufacturing process or through chemical decomposition. On the... 

Other anthropogenic contamination sources, such as disposal of unused or expired drugs or pharmaceutical industry discharges, should be assumed [26-30]. 

The success in determining the chemical structure of qinghaosu is only one example of the accomplishments of chemists in attaining a better understanding of the relationship between the chemical structure of natural drugs and their pharmacological effects. Those accomplishments have formed the basis of a whole new phase of the pharmaceutical industry in which natural products and their derivatives provide an extensive source of new drugs. 

Drugs.com. Drug Information Online. Available online. URL http // www.drugs.com. Downloaded June 16, 2009. Self-identified as a free, accurate, and independent source of information on 24,000 prescription drugs, OTC medicines, and natural products, this Web site does indeed contain an enormous amount of information on prescription drugs. The descriptions of drugs are clearly written and detailed, and daily medical news stories and pharmaceutical industry news offer added information. Without a specific topic or question of interest, however, the sheer amount of information makes the material overwhelming. 

Natural products represent an unparalleled source of molecular diversity for innovative drug discovery. In the pharmaceutical industry, there is an urgent need to identify novel lead structures for effective drug development in many therapeutic areas. It is likely that natural halogen compounds will continue to contribute leads to future research. 

Natural products have been, and remain, a rich source of leads for the pharmaceutical industry and many marketed drugs are either natural products or are modifications of such substances. Hence, considerable effort is spent in isolating and characterising chemicals from natural sources which can be tested in a variety of biological screens. Often, it is necessary to carry out laborious extraction and purification steps and the advent of directly coupled HPLC-NMR has been explored as an alternative technique for natural product identification. The use of HPLC-NMR, and other hyphenated techniques such as HPLC-MS-MS, for identification of natural products from plant sources has been reviewed by Wolfender and co-workers [40,41],... 

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