Natural Products in Modern Drug Discovery: Advances, Challenges and Emerging Technologies
Drug discovery is a complex and resource-intensive process, with lead identification representing a major bottleneck due to high attrition rates. Natural products have long served as a valuable source of structurally diverse and biologically active compounds, offering advantages such as evolutionary optimization, target specificity, and unique chemical diversity. This review provides a comprehensive and mechanistic overview of natural products as lead compounds, emphasizing their chemical characteristics, biological relevance, sources, mechanisms of action, and integration into modern drug discovery pipelines. A narrative review was conducted using major scientific databases (PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar), covering literature from 2000 to 2026. Relevant studies were selected based on scientific rigor and contribution to key themes, including natural product diversity, discovery strategies, and technological advancements. Natural products exhibit superior structural complexity and occupy unique chemical space compared to synthetic compounds, enabling effective interaction with diverse biological targets and supporting polypharmacological activity. Key sources include plants, microorganisms, and marine organisms, which have yielded numerous clinically important drugs. Advances in analytical techniques, genome mining, metabolomics, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence have significantly improved discovery and optimization processes. Despite challenges related to complexity and scalability, natural products remain indispensable in drug discovery, with emerging technologies enhancing their potential for addressing unmet medical needs.