Drug design and discovery

Question 1

How does modern drug discovery using natural products differ from historical use?

Answer 1

• We now usually test using pure compounds
• We can now correlate our results with biological mechanisms
• We can now discover the structure of any natural product

Question 2

Benefits of natural products as starting points for drug discovery

Answer 2

• Access to diverse and unusual chemical structures
• Might be produced through agriculture

Question 3

Phenotypic drug discovery

What it is and the advantages and disadvantages

Answer 3

• Looking at only the final effect of a drug rather than relying on knowledge/hypotheses of how the drug works
• Helps to have the mechanism eventually so that you can optimise the compound
• Advantages: removes bias, not limited to processes currently understood, can use complex natural product structures
• Disadvantages: hard to trouble-shoot, hard to optimise, compounds may be hard to produce from natural products