Humana Natural Products and Cancer Drug Discovery (Cancer Drug Discovery and Development)

With reliable commentary and analysis in a sector often associated with outlandish claims, this volume provides a valuable overview of how natural products could generate new cancer therapeutics as well as mitigating the deleterious effects of chemotherapy. Review From the reviews: “This book covers a range of topics related to drug discovery, natural product chemistry, cancer biology, and chemical biology. … value to researchers in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry who are involved in the study and development of natural products as potential chemotherapeutic agents. It also will be helpful to basic biomedical scientists and clinicians as a quick overview of this area of research and its recent developments. … also provides a critical assessment of the challenges that researchers in this research field face.” (Bao Ting Zhu, Doody’s Review Service, March, 2013) From the Back Cover Natural products- compounds derived from plants, microbes and marine organisms, have been an unsurpassed source of cancer drugs in the modern era of drug discovery.  The historical record is strong, but what is the current impact of natural  products in the discovery and development of cancer drugs, and importantly what are the prospects for natural products to be a valuable source of  future agents? This volume attempts to address this question through a series of chapters authored by leading researchers in the field which effectively provide an in-depth view of several high impact areas of natural products cancer research. The volume begins with a focused analysis and rationale for the clinical success  of current natural product anti-cancer drugs. The following chapters then describe new natural product based drugs in three rapidly evolving target classes and modalities- agents which target tumor vasculature, inhibitors of histone deacetylase and other histone modifying enzymes, and  antibody drug conjugates.  Subsequent chapters examine the central role of natural product chemical scaffolds in the genesis of new anti-cancer therapeutics- first via the powerful application of chemical synthesis, and then through the  rapidly emerging fields of biosynthetic engineering and plant cell culture.  The volume concludes with an assessment of the critical role that natural products continue to play in the search for new cancer drug targets.  As the reader makes his or her way through the volume it may become clear that there is strong evidence that natural products will continue to exert a profound positive impact on cancer drug discovery.