Drugs from Nature: Targets, Assay Systems, and Leads

The overview is done to determine whether the era of natural products for drug discovery is over or not over. Though the drug discovery process is considered scientific, the study reveals that it may be considered highly inefficient in the infant stage, and it is hard to distinguish between natural products and systematically prepared synthetic compounds. The inference is that the era of natural products is not over. A few decades ago, it was speculated that the number of new natural product-derived drugs could go to zero. However, this analysis has proved a fact contrary to the speculation. It shows that the era of natural product drug discovery is not over, but it is with an endless frontier.