Natural Products Chemistry

Natural products drug discovery is a source of important novel, pharmacologically active compounds. However, traditional methods associated with natural products are reputed as “slow and laborious” because significant quantities of individual compounds must be purified before they can be structurally characterized. Furthermore, in the absence of a robust “dereplication” program, purified compounds are too often determined to be duplicates of previously studied compounds. Nereus has capitalized on bioinformatics technologies that were developed to address the challenges of genomics and proteomics, including advances in sensitivity and throughput to accelerate natural products drug discovery and ensure the identification of novel compounds.

The Nereus natural products chemistry program was designed with an “up-front” approach to the prioritization of extracts through early chemical profiling. Only those extracts that pass a rigorous series of steps proceed to isolation and structure elucidation. These steps include the assessment of chemical diversity of batches of extracts and dereplication to assess the novelty of compounds present in the extracts.