Microbes to Smart Drugs

Natural products from microbial origin provide unlimited opportunities for new drug leads because of high chemical diversity. These microbial extracts can be either used as pure compounds or as standardized extracts. Due to an increased demand of natural products, chemical diversity in these extracts is required for the preparation of certain therapeutic drugs throughout the world. In the current scenario humankind is facing problems from several microbial infections for which many chemically synthesized drugs are being used as therapeutic agents for treating different diseases. These chemically synthesized drugs are often associated with unintended side effects. Therefore, research efforts in the recent past has been directed to invent new, safer and efficient natural metabolites that possess low toxicity and are easily obtainable with negligible environmental impact. Significance of natural products in the drug discovery and development processes has been reported extensively (Koehn and Carter, 2005).
Majority of the natural compounds have been isolated from plants that constitute a large fraction of the current pharmacopoeias. Besides medicinal plants, microorganisms have also been established as good sources of bioactive metabolites. Traditionally, the discoveries have come from microbial strains residing in soil but microorganisms from certain unusual ecological habitats or niches like plants, leaf litter, insects and dung can also be expected to yield novel molecules. Therefore, there is a general call to bio-prospect new microbial sources, especially from less explored regions and niches to maximize the isolation of novel bioactive metabolites. In this direction M/s Engrave Bio Labs has employed a novel approach of isolating and identifying nootropic supplements/smart drugs from fungal sources.