New aspects of natural products in drug discovery

During the past 15 years, most large pharmaceutical companies have decreased the screening of natural products for drug discovery in favor of synthetic compound libraries. Main reasons for this include the incompatibility of natural product libraries with high-throughput screening and the marginal improvement in core technologies for natural product screening in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Recently, the development of new technologies has revolutionized the screening of natural products. Applying these technologies compensates for the inherent limitations of natural products and offers a unique opportunity to re-establish natural products as a major source for drug discovery. Examples of these new advances and technologies are described in this review.