Synthetic Biology Journal

   

Research advances in biosynthesis of natural product drugs in the past decade

Jin FENG1, Haixue PAN1,2, Gongli TANG1,2   

  1. 1.School of Chemistry and Materials Science,Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study,University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,Hangzhou 310024,Zhejiang,China
    2.State Key Laboratory of Chemical Biology,Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Shanghai 200032,China
  • Received:2023-11-30 Revised:2023-12-22 Published:2024-02-04
  • Contact: Gongli TANG

近十年天然产物药物的生物合成研究进展

冯金1, 潘海学1,2, 唐功利1,2   

  1. 1.国科大杭州高等研究院,化学与材料科学学院,浙江 杭州 310024
    2.中国科学院上海有机化学研究所,生命过程小分子调控全国重点实验室,上海 200032
  • 通讯作者: 唐功利
  • 作者简介:冯金(1988—),男,博士,博士后。研究方向为活性天然产物的生物合成。E-mail:fengjin@ucas.ac.cn
    唐功利(1971—),男,博士,研究员。研究方向为天然产物生物合成和化学生物学。E-mail:gltang@sioc.ac.cn
  • 基金资助:
    国家自然科学基金(32070065)

Abstract:

Natural products have long been considered as an important source of potential lead drugs. In history, natural products and their structural analogs have made enormous contributions to the treatment of diseases, especially the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases. After a long application history, people gradually began to explore the active ingredients in natural products that truly exert therapeutic effects, and discovered a series of classic natural products, such as morphine, quinine, ephedrine, etc. Especially over the past two hundred years, the discovery and research of natural products has tremendously undergone changes and developments, transitioning from traditional isolation and identification methods to multidisciplinary approaches in the modern genomic era. An increasing number of natural product discovery strategies and genomic prediction tools have been developed. Although many novel and active natural products have been continuously discovered and mined in the past two decades, considering the total amount of natural products in nature, a substantial number of natural product biosynthetic gene clusters have not yet been characterized, and there are still vast terrestrial and marine natural product resources to be explored. Compared with traditional chemically synthesized molecules, natural products possess abundant skeleton diversity and structural complexity, which have shown remarkable advantages in new drug discovery. While there are still various challenges in the innovation of new drugs based on natural products, such as the effective mining of molecules with new structural features, isolation and identification of trace amounts of natural products, derivatization of natural product analogs for exploring structure-activity relationships, and industrial total synthesis of complex active natural products, etc., the emergence of novel analytical technologies and mining strategies is expected to usher in a new stage of natural product discovery. This review consolidates information on the natural product drugs and semisynthetic drugs derived from natural products approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the past decade (January 2014 to October 2023), and provides an overview on the research progress on biosynthesis of these natural products and semisynthetic drug precursors. In addition, important biosynthetic progress in some old FDA-approved drugs over the past decade is briefly summarized. The in-depth understanding of the biosynthetic pathways and mechanisms of these drug-related natural products is expected to provide valuable insights for the discovery and research of more innovative drugs in the future.

Key words: natural products, semisynthetic drugs, drug discovery, biosynthesis

摘要:

天然产物一直是潜在的先导药物的重要来源,天然产物及其结构类似物在历史上对疾病治疗做出了重大贡献,特别是对癌症和传染病的治疗。在过去两百年的时间里,天然产物的发现和研究经历了巨大的变化,由传统的分离鉴定为主的经典研究方法转为了基因组时代的多学科组合研究。虽然近二十年发现和挖掘了丰富的活性天然产物,但与自然界中巨大的天然产物合成潜力相比,仍有庞大的陆地和海洋天然产物资源有待开发。同时,与传统的化学合成分子相比,天然产物具有丰富的骨架多样性和结构复杂性,在新药发现中展现了巨大的优势。虽然在天然产物的新药创新方面仍面临着种种挑战,但新的分析技术和挖掘策略的出现有望迎来天然产物发现的新阶段。本文总结了近十年(2014年1月-2023年10月)美国食品药品监督管理局批准成药的天然产物及源自天然产物的半合成药物,并对其中纯天然产物来源分子、重要的半合成天然产物前体的生物合成研究进展进行了详细总结。此外还简要总结了一些FDA批准的老药在过去十年中取得的重要生物合成研究进展。期望通过对成药天然产物生物合成途径及机制的深入理解,为更多天然产物创新药物的发现和研究提供借鉴。

关键词: 天然产物, 半合成药物, 新药发现, 生物合成

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