Natural products in clinical trials: Current state of play and future directions

The last 10 years have seen massive changes in the pharmaceutical industry with a narrowing of therapeutic focus, continued mergers, a large number of redundancies and a massive increase in outsourcing. During this period, the number of new small molecule drug approvals has been around 15 – 30 NCE per year despite increased expenditure and more advanced technologies. Companies now predominantly rely upon of high throughput, fragment and virtual screening to identifying new lead compounds with natural product (NP) screening being almost virtually ignored. This is counter initiative as NPs have always played an important role in drug development with a considerable number of marketed drugs being NP-derived. In addition, NPs often also occupy chemical space not usually found in synthetic based screening libraries and are often excellent leads for drug development despite their often complex structures.

This talk will summarize the NPs, semi-synthetic (SS) NPs, NP-derived compounds and NP-containing antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) undergoing clinical evaluation or registration, and new NP drug pharmacophores will be analysed. In addition, an insight will be given on how NP-derived compounds move from the bench into clinical trials.