Why Natural Extracts
Traditional Medicine
Seeking cure from a disease and its associated symptoms is one of the basic needs of human beings. Traditionally, healing power was wielded by medicine man/shaman, using remedies of regional natural origin tailored to individual needs. Today, traditional medicine has developed into different fields. Every culture has its favored natural products such as plants, with official monographs backing their save use. Companies in the field of traditional herbal medicine develop medicines based on these monographs. As there is no intellectual property involved, the competition next door is allowed to produce a similar product. Marketing has hence a regional touch and sales potential for the single company is limited. These companies are trapped in a viscous circle, as the generally limited income does not allow for risky innovation and expensive evidence-based product development processes.
Pharmaceutical Industry
In industrialized countries, chemical drug companies have dominated the last 100 years. The emphasis gradually shifted from extracting medicinal compounds from natural products to producing these compounds or their analogues synthetically. Natural products were widely viewed as templates for structure optimization programs designed to make perfect new drugs, referred to by industry as “new chemical entities” (NCE), backed by an almost globally functioning intellectual property mechanism. Over time, the pharmaceutical industry has developed the paradigm “one-target-one-disease” and is suggesting a solution for a linear cause/effect relation with a technology that can enjoy patent protection (ideally with only one active agent as this simplifies the entire development process). This approach requires big investment in screening facilities and many years to meet the registration requirements as the basis of the drugs often are single “new” molecules with yet unknown interaction with humans and results in development costs of well over US 500m on average. Therefore pharmaceutical companies require a market potential of US 1bn+ as a general entry hurdle for a candidate to be seriously looked at.
Why natural Product Extracts
It is easy to overlook the fact that human medicines still contain natural product extracts – valued at over US 30bn globally. Some of the most important pharmaceuticals still derived from plants include Taxol, Digoxin, Artemisinin and many more. Recent competition from combinatorial chemistry and computational drug design has put an end to the dominance of natural substances as a source in the discovery of medicines.
Despite intense focus on modern drug discovery techniques the NCE pipelines of pharmaceutical companies are at historically low levels. Problems of resistance and negative side-effect experiences have put in question the NCE paradigm to treat a complex disease with a “single golden molecular bullet”, with more and more pharmaceutical products being registered as combination drugs. Interestingly, natural product extracts ARE naturally consisting of several components, active agents alongside “others” making up the blend. Often it can be observed that due to being a blend, herbal remedies need smaller concentration of the active agent or even have no "active" pharmaceutical principle, thereby reducing the risk for adverse side effects. Additionally, the “others” can often be associated with additional positive effects, making the healing process more effective, less toxic and less vulnerable towards development of resistance.
Natural products clearly have the potential to become again an important source for finding new medicines if one of the major obstacles, the lack of reproducibility of activity, can be overcome. Modern Biotechnology is slowly finding its way into the natural extracts industry, with companies being founded that see the development of natural extracts based medicines on a scientific base as an opportunity. These companies develop medicines based on natural extracts which enjoy patent protection, establish reliable raw material sourcing and therefore are able to tap into the global pharmaceutical market, becoming an interesting pipeline candidate for big pharmaceutical companies.
Despite intense focus on modern drug discovery techniques the NCE pipelines of pharmaceutical companies are at historically low levels. Problems of resistance and negative side-effect experiences have put in question the NCE paradigm to treat a complex disease with a “single golden molecular bullet”, with more and more pharmaceutical products being registered as combination drugs. Interestingly, natural product extracts ARE naturally consisting of several components, active agents alongside “others” making up the blend. Often it can be observed that due to being a blend, herbal remedies need smaller concentration of the active agent or even have no "active" pharmaceutical principle, thereby reducing the risk for adverse side effects. Additionally, the “others” can often be associated with additional positive effects, making the healing process more effective, less toxic and less vulnerable towards development of resistance.
Natural products clearly have the potential to become again an important source for finding new medicines if one of the major obstacles, the lack of reproducibility of activity, can be overcome. Modern Biotechnology is slowly finding its way into the natural extracts industry, with companies being founded that see the development of natural extracts based medicines on a scientific base as an opportunity. These companies develop medicines based on natural extracts which enjoy patent protection, establish reliable raw material sourcing and therefore are able to tap into the global pharmaceutical market, becoming an interesting pipeline candidate for big pharmaceutical companies.
