Are we seeing a resurgence in the use of natural products for new drug discovery?

The contribution of natural products (NPs) to drug development has been extensively documented. The structural diversity and biological activity of NPs make them the most valuable sources of drugs and drug leads. Table 1 shows examples of representative drugs discovered from NPs. They include several well-known history-changing drugs, such as penicillin, morphine, paclitaxel, avermectins, and artemisinin. In fact, more than one-third of all the US FDA-approved therapeutic agents over the past 20 years are derived from or inspired by NPs, and more than 50% of the developed small-molecule drugs from 1981 to 2014 were originated fromNPs, semi-synthetic NPs and NP-derivedmimetics [1]. Since cytarabine became the first FDA-approved marine-derived anticancer drug in 1969, exploitation of marine environments especially marine microorganisms has led to encouraging outcomes. So far, more than 28,500 marine natural products (MRPs) have been identified, in a rate of ~1000 new compounds per year since 2008, including approximately 1490 new compounds in 2017 [2]. Many of theseMRPs have been applied in medicine and agrochemistry, such as the commercialized Cytarabine, Vidarabine, Eribulin, and Ziconotide. These results demonstrate that MRPs might be the most recent source of bioactive molecules, and their potentials as novel drugs or drug leads are underexplored. The climax of the story emerged in 2015, when the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura, and Youyou Tu for the discovery of avermectins and artemisinin, respectively.