Oral Presentation RACI Biomolecular Division Conference 2013

Natural Products in a Drug Discovery Environment (#26)

Ronald J Quinn 1
  1. Eskitis Institute, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

The revival of natural products arises because of their novel chemotypes and because of the inherent difficulty associated with producing synthetic libraries that contain molecules that interact with biology space.

Natural products have an inherent understanding of biology space.  Our lead discovery program is based on the drug-like natural product metabolome.1, 2  Natural products and their analogues have had high impact as drugs because of the embedded biosynthetic molecular recognition that transfers to therapeutic targets as described by protein fold topology (PFT).3, 4 

The lecture will present recent efforts in our laboratory to contribute to the revival  by transforming the classical bioassay-guided approach to natural product drug discovery.

  1. Camp, D.; Davis, R. A.; Campitelli, M.; Ebdon, J.; Quinn, R. J. Drug-like properties: guiding principles for the design of natural product libraries. J. Nat. Prod. 2012, 75, 72-81.
  2. Camp, D.; Davis, R. A.; Evans-Illidge, E. A.; Quinn, R. J. Guiding principles for natural product drug discovery. Future Med. Chem. 2012, 4, 1067–1084.
  3. McArdle, B. M.; Campitelli, M. R.; Quinn, R. J. A common Protein Fold Topology shared by flavonoid biosynthetic enzymes and therapeutic targets. J. Nat. Prod. 2006, 69, 14-17.
  4. Kellenberger, E.; Hofmann, A.; Quinn, R. J. Similar interactions of natural products with biosynthetic enzymes and therapeutic targets could explain why nature produces such a large proportion of existing drugs. Nat. Prod. Rep. 2011, 28, 1483-1492.