Novel high through-put approach and molecular modelling in drug discovery from natural products and clinical implications

Editorial. We are witnessing a slow pace of new drugs developed from the pharmaceutical industry in recent times, largely due to its high-cost and low-success rate of drug discovery and development approaches. Quite often, it is not straightforward to identify lead structures from high throughput screening and combinatorial chemistry, let alone the high cost and time-consuming process in validation of drug targets and later stage clinical trials. As a result, there is a renewed interest in studying effective natural medicines for discovering innovative therapies for important diseases. In fact, natural products have played significant roles in both drug discovery and chemical biology. Many of the currently approved therapeutics are derived from natural sources, such as salicylic acid and cardiotonics as early examples. More recent examples include a very successful anti-malaria drug artemisinin which is derived from a plant used in Chinese traditional medicine for centuries (Artemisia annua). Thus, it is important to study the natural products as a source for innovative drugs.