Recent Advances in the Discovery of Novel Drugs on Natural Molecules

Drug discovery is still one of the fundamental pillars of modern medicine; the urgency in seeking new natural compounds or reusing old drugs for new therapeutic solutions is always a current topic. Since most compounds exhibit synergistic effects or share multiple targets, traditional approaches to finding potential drug candidates can reduce their therapeutic efficacy. As a result, new techniques are required to produce drugs with high and multi-target activity as well as improved bioavailability. In this regard, the application of multidisciplinary approaches, bioinformatics, data mining, pathway refactoring, cell factories, metabolomics, and computational chemistry, allows for the revelation of novel drug molecules from microbial strains or bioresources that might otherwise escape notice when using classical top-down strategies. The collection of articles in this book covers key topics related to the discovery of new natural molecules with biological activity; the herein collected studies open new pathways toward the more efficient and targeted enhancement of natural compounds for drug development.