The inspiration provided by biologically active natural products to conceive of hybrids, congeners, analogs and unnatural variants is discussed by experts in the field in 16 highly informative chapters.

Using well-documented studies over the past decade, this timely monograph demonstrates the current importance and future potential of natural products as starting points for the development of new drugs with improved properties over their progenitors.

The examples are chosen so as to represent a wide range of natural products with therapeutic relevance among others, as anticancer agents, antimicrobials, antifungals, antisense nucleosides, antidiabetics, and analgesics.

From the content:
* Part I: Natural Products as Sources of Potential Drugs and Systematic Compound Collections
* Part II: From Marketed Drugs to Designed Analogs and Clinical Candidates
* Part III: Natural Products as an Incentive for Enabling Technologies
* Part IV: Natural Products as Pharmacological Tools
* Part V: Nature: The Provider, the Enticer, and the Healer



Stephen Hanessian holds the Isis Pharmaceuticals Research Chair at the University of Montreal and is also on the faculty of the Departments of Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacology at the University of California, Irvine. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, the latest being the 2012 Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products from the American Chemical Society, the IUPAC-Richter Prize in Medicinal Chemistry, and the Montreal InVivo Prize for innovation. Professor Hanessian has over 500 journal publications to his name, which span a wide cross-section of areas related to organic, bioorganic, and medicinal chemistry. His latest book 'Design and Strategy in Organic Synthesis - From the Chiron Approach to Catalysis' (Wiley-VCH) has received wide acclaim.