Natural Products in Modern Pharmaceutics: Emerging Roles in Drug Discovery, Formulation Development and Targeted Drug Delivery
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64882/ijrt.v13.i3.1801Keywords:
solid lipid nanoparticles, phytosomes, targeted drug delivery, nanocarriers, bioavailability enhancement, phytoconstituents, natural productsAbstract
Natural products have shaped therapeutics for millennia and continue to supply a disproportionate share of clinically approved small molecules, particularly in oncology and anti-infective therapy. Structural analyses show that natural products occupy regions of chemical space that synthetic combinatorial libraries rarely reach, with high sp³ carbon content, multiple stereocentres and privileged scaffolds pre-selected for interaction with biological macromolecules (Atanasov et al., 2021; Rodrigues et al., 2016). Despite this pharmacological richness, the translation of natural products into marketable medicines remains constrained by poor aqueous solubility, extensive presystemic metabolism, chemical instability, low intestinal permeability and consequent low and erratic oral bioavailability. Modern pharmaceutics has responded with an expanding toolkit of enabling formulation technologies — solid dispersions, cyclodextrin inclusion complexes, lipid-based systems, self-emulsifying drug delivery systems, phospholipid complexes (phytosomes), polymeric nanoparticles, liposomes and solid lipid nanoparticles — that repeatedly deliver several-fold to several-hundred-fold improvements in solubility and systemic exposure. Layered onto these carriers, passive and ligand-mediated active targeting strategies are enabling site-specific accumulation of natural actives in tumours and in defined organs, improving therapeutic indices. In parallel, cheminformatics, metabolomics-guided dereplication, genome mining and artificial intelligence are accelerating the discovery and prioritisation of new natural scaffolds. This review synthesises the current position of natural products across the pharmaceutical value chain — discovery, formulation development and targeted delivery — with tabulated comparative data, and critically examines translational barriers including scale-up, standardisation, regulatory classification and reproducible quality control.
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