Haruhisa Kikuchi: Old yet New Natural Products Chemistry

2024/10/22

Are you familiar with the Medicinal Plant Garden at the Urawa-Kyoritsu Campus? Since I joined the Faculty of Pharmacy in 2021, I have been appointed as the Director of the Medicinal Plant Garden (since I am usually at the Shiba-Kyoritsu Campus, the management of the garden is handled by specialized staff). In the Medicinal Plant Garden, more than 800 species of plants are cultivated on a site of approximately 3,500 square meters, including the source plants for crude drugs listed in the Japanese Pharmacopoeia and familiar medicinal and poisonous plants. It is also open to the public, so if you are interested, please come and visit. Personally, I recommend the period from spring to summer when the flowers of medicinal plants are in beautiful bloom.

Now, my area of expertise is natural products chemistry, and I have been conducting natural product drug discovery research to find drug seeds (drug discovery seeds) from compounds produced by organisms such as plants, molds, and bacteria. At first glance, this kind of research seems easy to understand and useful. However, as a result of many researchers having vigorously conducted such research, it has become difficult to discover new drug discovery seeds from natural compounds in recent years, and it is often said to be a traditional but old research approach.

However, organisms such as plants and microorganisms produce natural compounds with chemical structures that humans cannot even imagine, and the uniqueness and complexity of these chemical structures remain important for drug discovery. By combining the latest methods, such as organic synthetic chemistry, genetic information of plants and microorganisms that produce compounds, and structure generators using generative AI, with natural products chemistry, we aim to conduct research to find innovative drug discovery seeds that cannot be found through conventional research.

The buildings, such as the management building of the botanical garden on the campus where the aforementioned Medicinal Plant Garden is located, are somewhat old and have a charming atmosphere with a hint of the Showa era, but they are indispensable for supplying the plant materials necessary for research. Recently, we have also made some improvements so that it can be used as a place for microbial culture. We will conduct innovative research using the latest methods while making good use of existing knowledge and locations. I would like to continue to promote research that puts this "old yet new natural products chemistry" into practice and benefits society through drug discovery.