The majority of approved drugs during the last 40 years for the treatment of most diseases are natural products or lead compounds originating from natural products. We use a traditional bioassay-guided fractionation approach to isolate and identify bioactive natural products from complex plant extracts. Focus is on natural products that have a preventive effect on common life style diseases and/or may be used as lead compounds for the development of drugs against cancer, type 2 diabetes or inflammatory diseases. To elucidate the possible mechanisms of action of bioactive natural products we use gene expression, in silico docking, targeted metabolomics and pharmacokinetic studies.

To identify scaffolds or pharmacophores in bioactive compounds we use mainly in silico docking and structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies. Additive or synergistic effects between natural products is a well-known phenomenon, and we investigate these effects in dose-response models. We use rodent or other in vivo models for confirmation of the bioactivity of natural products and as an important step towards clinical trials. Finally, we use methods based on traditional chromatographic and chemical engineering purification methods for large-scale isolation of natural products for the use in combinatorial chemistry and in vivo studies.