Natural Products That Changed Society

Natural products that inhibit carbonic anhydrase.

The chemical diversity, binding specificity and propensity to interact with biological targets has inspired many researchers to utilize natural products as molecular probes. Almost all reported carbonic anhydrase inhibitors comprise a zinc binding group in their structure of which the primary sulfonamide moiety (-SO2NH2) is the foremost example and to a lesser extent the primary sulfamate (-O-S...

Antimalarial natural products: a review

Objective: Malaria is an infectious disease commonplace in tropical countries. For many years, major antimalarial drugs consisted of natural products, but since 1930s these drugs have been largely replaced with a series of synthetic drugs. This article tries to briefly indicate that some plants which previously were used to treat malaria, as a result of deficiencies of synthetic drugs, have rev...

A common pharmacophore for cytotoxic natural products that stabilize microtubules.

Taxol (paclitaxel), a complex diterpene obtained from the Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia, is arguably the most important new drug in cancer chemotherapy. The mechanism of cytotoxic action for paclitaxel-i.e., the stabilization of microtubules leading to mitotic arrest-is now shared by four recently identified natural products, eleutherobin, epothilones A and B, and discodermolide. Their ability ...

“Not Everything That Is Faced Can Be Changed, but Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced”: A Response to Recent Commentaries

The Virus That Changed My World

When I first read this little poem in The Lancet in January 2003 (Heikkinen and Jarvinen 2003), it elicited little more than a bemused chortle. There are few who would deny the paradox that for all the medical advances providing cures for multitudinous diseases afflicting the human condition, there remains a large hole in the understanding of and treatment for the common cold. We know that it i...