Natural compounds from land & sea as drug candidates

Wnt signaling is one of the key pathways for organism development and cell proliferation, but is also tightly associated with cancer. Despite huge research efforts, the search for drugs targeting Wnt has not yet led to the discovery of new cancer treatments.

Natural compounds are a potential source of drug candidates against Wnt signaling that remains largely unexplored. In their recent book chapter, published in Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology, researchers from the laboratory of Prof. Vladimir Katanaev review their potential for the search of Wnt modulating drugs. They take the reader through a collection of short stories that illustrate the pipeline of drug discovery in an original way inspired by the “Land and sea tales” book written by the author of the Jungle Book. For example, scientists explain how they explored the chemical diversity of marine invertebrates and identified potential Wnt-modulating drugs in Pacific brittle stars.

Extracts from various marine invertebrates allowed to discover potential drug candidates modulating Wnt pathway © Katanaev et al. 2021 in Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology

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