Keynote Lecture 14 “Discovery of Anticancer Agents of Diverse Natural Origin”

Cancer remains a constant threat to human health worldwide, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) projected recently there is a total mortality figure of about 10 million annually [1]. One well- established form of treatment for cancer is chemotherapy, and, according to an overview article, 100 (38.6%) of 259 small-molecule anticancer agents introduced into therapy in Western medicine from 1946-2019 were either unmodified natural products or semi-synthetic derivatives of natural products [2]. In this presentation, the design of a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional natural products drug discovery research program, funded through the NIH “program project” model will be described, involving collaborators from three primary universities and an industrial company. The overall objective of this program is the discovery of new anticancer agent lead compounds from selected organisms, including tropical plants and U.S. lichens and their mycobionts, aquatic and soil cyanobacteria, and filamentous fungi. The program project organization comprises three “projects” focused on the collection and chemistry of each major type of organism mentioned above, which are supported by three “cores” (i.e., administration and biostatistics; biological and mechanistic evaluation; medicinal chemistry and pharmacokinetics). Progress made in elucidating new bioactive lead compounds germane to cancer chemotherapy over the last five years has been summarized recently, with a quite broad range of lead bioacrive compounds identified [3]. An emphasis will be made on how the various components of the program project are integrated with one another.

 

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Conflict of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

• References

• 1 Sung H, Ferlay J, Siegel RL. et al. Global cancer statistics 2020: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries. CA Cancer J 2021; 71: 209-249
• 2 Newman DJ, Cragg GM.. Natural products as sources of new drugs over the nearly four decades from 01/1981 to 09/2019. J Nat Prod 2020; 83: 770-803
• 3 Aldrich LN, Burdette JE, Carcache de Blanco EJ. et al. Discovery of anticancer agents of diverse natural origin. J Nat Prod 2022; 85: 702-719

Publikationsverlauf

Artikel online veröffentlicht:
16. November 2023