Natural products as drug leads: an old process or the new hope for drug discovery?

Although the use of natural products as leads to drugs waned in the early 1980s with the rise of combinatorial chemistry as a putative discovery tool, inspection of the chemical literature shows that research in natural products, in one guise or another, is alive and active and the 'chemical inspiration' from these privileged structures is leading to novel approaches in drug design and discovery. In this short article, we propose why we consider natural products are poised for a renaissance as tools for drug discovery.