Natural Products: Source of Potential Drugs

Natural products isolated from various sources especially derived from plants, have long been used in treatment of human ailments. For long time, the approach to new drugs through natural products was proved to be the single most successful strategy for the discovery of new drugs. Despite the initial success, chemical diversity and specific action on target, drug discovery from natural products, has been deemphasized by many pharmaceutical companies in favour of approaches based on combinatorial chemistry and genomics. Besides covering the historical notes and the drugs already isolated from different natural sources like plants, fungi, marine organisms and animals, this review article is also presenting the reasons for the leg back in the field. Natural products have a large unexplored range of compounds, which is almost impossible to imitate; they will always remain a potential source of future drug discovery.