Building Natural Product-Based Libraries for Drug Discovery: Challenges and Opportunities from a Brazilian Pharmaceutical Industry Perspective

Natural products represent an important source of new leads in drug discovery research. Several drugs currently used as therapeutic agents have been developed from natural sources, bioactive crude extracts and their plant secondary metabolites being specifically important. The screening of natural products can provide greater structural diversity than standard synthetic chemistry and offer significant opportunities for finding novel low molecular weight lead compounds. However, research with natural products also presents challenges for drug discovery, such as access and use of biological resources, technical barriers to screening, isolation, characterization, and resupply. Therefore, different strategies are presented as possible for a natural product-based drug discovery process. This review leads the reader through the main processes necessary to develop a modern natural product-based drug discovery program by summarizing the methods and strategies used to assemble and manage natural product libraries of plant origin. In addition, it brings insightful comments from a pharmaceutical industry perspective and presents original content, such as a curation of commercially available natural product libraries.