Bioactive Compounds and Their Optimized Structural Derivatives of Natural Products

Dear Colleagues,

As an invaluable source of new drug discoveries, natural products have novel, diverse and complex structures; unique biological activities; and a novel mechanism of action. Through the statistics and collation of the drugs approved by FDA in the past 40 years, it was found that more than 45% of the drugs were derived from natural products and their derivatives, especially antibacterial, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antitumor drugs. However, natural products generally have relatively low content in nature, a complex structure, relatively difficult synthesis, and certain difficulty in achieving mass production. Lead compounds or drug candidates can be obtained via the structural modification or optimization of natural products. In general, optimizing natural lead compounds into novel drugs or drug candidates not only addresses drug efficacy, but also improves ADMET properties and chemical accessibility associated with natural drugs. This can provide a new way to break through the bottleneck of the development of novel, targeted drugs. This Special Issue aims to summarize the latest research results and progress in the field of natural products. We invite both reviews and original articles that shed light on the discovery of natural bioactive compounds and their analogues, the structural modification of bioactive natural products, biological evaluation and the mechanistic investigations of the bioactive compounds.

Dr. Yanhua Fan
Dr. Shuzhen Mu
Guest Editors

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