I have with me today a special guest and university distinguished professor from Virginia Tech and well known expert in the field of natural products, David Kingston. We discuss the compounds found in natural products that have been used and still are used often in our world today, such as for Malaria and even the Coronavirus. There is a lot of potential still for the advancement of natural products in medicine going forward, which David and I touch on. We end the episode talking about the pandemic and how natural products are being used today to fight the virus.

David’s background 1:03
History of the compounds from natural products 5:52
The most interesting place for David to study natural products 8:42
What is the future of finding natural products for medicine? 16:34
David’s thoughts on natural products related to the pandemic 19:18

“Natural products have a built in advantage as drugs compared with flat molecules which are the sort of things that synthetic chemists can make by the hundreds, but they may not be that good as compounds, taking a lot of development to turn those into drugs. So natural products have a built in advantage, and I’m a great fan.” 18:52