Searching for the compounds as antitumor drug-seed from microbial origin

Abstract

Despite the dramatic progress of cancer research, cancer is a major cause of death in Japan, and development of effective therapeutic drugs is still needed. In recent years, molecular targeted therapeutic drugs targeting genes involved in cancer onset have greatly contributed to cancer treatment. In developing this molecular targeted drug, how to search for new drug target molecules and how to efficiently obtain the lead compound becomes a problem. Natural products have made a great contribution to the development of pharmaceutical development so far, accounting for about 60% of medicines approved in the past 30 years. Meanwhile, in recent years, the mainstream of drug development has shifted to synthetic compounds, and natural product screening tends to shrink. However, natural products are overwhelmingly dominant in terms of “structural diversity” and “Bioactive diversity” compared to synthetic compounds, therefore, natural products still have sufficient potential as a drug seed. We therefore conducted natural product screening in microorganisms to obtain the compounds that function as antitumor drug-seed. In this article, we describe the studies on the antitumor drug-seed from the microbial secondary metabolites we isolated.