Denis Mteremkoa*, Ernest Mbega, Jaffu Chilongola and Musa Chach
The problem of increase in antibiotic resistance is often linked with the slow pace at which new antibiotic compounds are discovered and developed. Among several other factors, the problem has been exacerbated by most pharmaceutical companies losing interest in new drug discovery and development process owing to insurmountable cost barriers of the drug research and development for novel antibiotic drugs. Most large pharmaceutical companies have abandoned natural product screening for drugs in favour of high throughput screening of chemical libraries consisting of laboratory parallel and massively synthesized small molecules, made by combinatorial chemistry approach, which have often culminated in failure. Recent advances in analytical chemistry, chemical synthetic methods, computational chemistry, computational biophysics, computational biology, genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and microbiology, are making screening of natural products once more amenable to drug discovery. This review focuses on the advances and technologies currently available for discovery, design and development of novel antibiotic drugs for clinical practices, and the current status, progress and capacity building for exploration of the rich biodiversity in Africa. In addition, strategies involving public-private partnerships including sharing and pooling together of resources-biological, technical and financial, for screening of natural products, as well as technology transfer and expertise sharing across Africa are discussed.
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Journal of Pharmacognosy & Natural Products received 606 citations as per Google Scholar report
