Progesterone was originally produced in the 1940s from the roots of wild Mexican yams.
Nitpick - Curare is not an anaesthetic; it’s a muscle relaxant.
What constitutes the “same neck of the woods” for cancer, which is pretty much universal? In any case, why would you expect to find a cure for a disease in any particular area? There wouldn’t be any evolutionary reason to expect a plant to develop a compound effective against a disease found in local animals.
The logic of looking for new drugs in the tropics in particular is due to the extremely high diversity of life there and the corresponding highly competitive environment. Plants, for example, have to defend themselves against a huge range of herbivorous animals, especially insects, plus pathogens such as fungi, bacteria, and viruses. The same is true of coral reef organisms such as sponges. These sedentary organisms can’t escape their enemies by moving away, so they produce a great variety of exotic bioactive compounds that are effective against various organisms.
The idea is that some of these compounds will fortuitously be effective against other organisms, such as those that produce disease, or against particular cell types such as cancer. This does in fact sometimes turn out to be the case. We have a bioprospecting program here in Panama that has turned up compounds from tropical marine organisms that are active against malaria and leishmaniasis; some of these compounds are currently in further testing.
Our weekly newsletter just came out, and had an article on our bioprospecting program. So far, the plant part of the program has tested 2,387 compounds isolated from 103 species of plants in Panama. From those, 12 have proven to be active against cancer and tropical disease.
Now it’s a long way from merely finding activity to actually producing a working drug, but these compounds provide the raw materials.
Man, that’s got a lot of stereocenters. I count 12, but I could be off. I didn’t realize they’d pulled off a total synthesis nearly 20 years ago. Are they still using the natural product or have there been analogs synthesized and tested?
Not quite. See this site. Scroll down to #11 and #12
The National Cancer Institute’s Natural Products Repository is actually a really interesting place. Reminds me of a winery!
You’re arguing at cross-purposes here… If it were as easy as walking into the jungle and tripping over cures, there’d be no problem with clear-cutting. Just make sure to walk in first and see if you trip over anything. As it is, though, it can and does require years of scrutiny (or thousands of years, even) to find the beneficial compounds. Therefore, we should make sure that all of the rain forest species (even the ones with no as-yet-known benefits) stick around for thousands of years, so we have a chance to figure them out.
I count 13. Did you count the alpha position to the benzene ring that holds the benzamide group?
Regarding taxol anologues, a quick search found this current research.
It seems the compound is obtained commercially by extraction of the 10-deacetyl baccatin III from the leaves of the European Yew followed by semi-synthesis of the taxol from this compound.