Medicinal Chemistry: Natural Products, Prodrugs & their Pharmacological Functions

The “Medicinal Chemistry Team: Natural Products, Prodrugs & their Pharmacological Functions” study the extraordinary therapeutic potential of natural molecules deriving from plants and develop innovative pro-drug approaches to make them more specific to cell or tissue types.
Plants produce specialized metabolites to defend themselves against predators or pests. These molecules display precise biological activities due to the optimization of their interaction with their target, which allowed species to survive over the millennia. In this respect, most specialized metabolites are considered to have potential therapeutic utility and are regarded as privileged structures pre-validated by Nature. They often have highly complex structures which confer them pharmacological specificities. They also display high chemical diversity and cover a biologically relevant chemical space. Even today, over 60% of cancer chemotherapies are derived from natural products. However, these natural products do not necessarily target cancer cells specifically. One way to make them more specific is to use prodrug approaches, in which the structure of the active compound is modified to make it temporarily inactive, and then its active structure is regenerated thanks to a stimulus produced by the cancer cells.