UDAIPUR, Nov 28 (TIWN): A two daylong seminar of recent advances in natural products chemistry for drug discovery was organised at Udaipur Rajashri town hall on Friday.

Speaking at the program, IICT director Hyderabad Dr.S.Chandrasekhar said that Natural products and their derivatives have historically been invaluable as a source of therapeutic agents. However, in the past decade, research into natural products in the pharmaceutical industry has declined, owing to issues such as the lack of compatibility of traditional natural-product extract libraries with high-throughput screening. However, recent technological advances that help to address these issues, coupled with unrealized expectations from current lead-generation strategies, have led to a renewed interest in natural products in drug discovery.

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in natural product research due to the failure of alternative drug discovery methods to deliver many lead compounds in key therapeutic areas such as immunosuppression, anti-infective, and metabolic diseases. To continue to be competitive with other drug discovery methods, natural product research needs to continually improve the speed of the screening, isolation, and structure elucidation processes, as well addressing the suitability of screens for natural product extracts and dealing with issues involved with large-scale compound supply, added dignitaries.

However, the program is scheduled to be concluded on Nov 29.