Pharmaceutical Biology

Natural products are an essential source of new drugs, especially antimicrobials and anticancer drugs. In the clinical treatment of infectious diseases, natural products have significant advantages over antibacterial drugs. Antimicrobial resistance is a serious public health concern. The mechanism of drug resistance is mainly studied in bacteria, as several life-threatening, hospitalized, and difficult to treat infectious diseases are often associated with pathogenic bacterial strains. Bacterial resistance has developed to every antibiotic in clinical use and new and effective antibiotics is urgently needed.

In the context of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, researchers are exploring natural products as a means of providing effective and accessible treatment methods. Natural products exhibit non-specific and specific antibacterial activity mechanisms and display complex molecular structures. Despite of the existence of some challenges for future research, such as low bioavailability, short half-life and low PK/PD values, natural product antimicrobials are rapidly and prominently developing, in light of emerging new infectious diseases.

Antimicrobial agents can be obtained from any natural source: plant, marine, soil, insect, etc. Papers describing synthetic or semi-synthetic antimicrobials that are clearly based on natural product leads are acceptable for the collection. Topics that will be covered in this Article Collection include but are not limited to:

•   Discovery of new natural or natural derived antimicrobials
•   Synthesis and structure-activity relationship of natural product antimicrobials
•   Study on the mechanism of actions of antimicrobial natural product or its derivatives
•   Isolation and characterization of new natural product antimicrobials
•   In vitro and/or in vivo antimicrobial activity of pure natural product or its derivatives
•   Clinical effect of the combined use of natural product antimicrobials and clinically approved drugs

Studies on complex herbal extracts must characterize their chemical composition (e.g., HPLC fingerprinting analysis or quantization of major compounds). We welcome the following types of articles: original papers, reviews, perspectives, notes, and short communications.

Dr. Cassia Mizuno earned her B.S in Pharmacy and Biochemistry at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. In 2006, she received her Ph.D in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Mississippi, followed by her postdoctoral training at the USDA-ARS, where she worked on the discovery of natural product-based anticancer agents and environmentally friendly pesticides. Dr. Mizuno research interests include modification of natural products in the search of compounds with but not limited to anticancer, antimicrobial, anti-parasitic and analgesic activities. Expertise: medicinal chemistry, natural products chemistry, multi-step organic synthesis.

Disclosure statement: Dr. Cassia Mizuno has no conflicts of interest to disclose regarding this work.

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