The discovery of new bioactive compounds and ultimately drugs is a marathon exercise which combines a multitude of different disciplines including computer science, organic synthesis, cell biology, molecular biology, biophysics and biochemistry. Its success is decisively influenced by the initial choice of the compounds to be synthesized and analyzed in biological formats. In this respect bioactive secondary metabolites (“natural products”) have performed exceedingly well. They have been selected in evolution and encode the ability of small molecules to interact with target biomacromolecules.<br/> <br/>The lecture will demonstrate that natural products and compound collections based on their core structures – natural product inspired libraries and “pseudo” natural products – are rich sources of innovation for both chemical biology and medicinal chemistry research. It will describe the design principles for such libraries, which are rooted in biological evolution, their synthesis and application in cell-based phenotypic assays and the identification of the cellular target proteins of the identified active hits.<br/>Examples will include new modulators of and biological target proteins in major developmental and cancer-related pathways and autophagy.<br/>

Chemotype - phenotype - target

255th National Meeting (2018)

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