Leveraging Mammalian Therapeutic Research To Identify Novel Lead Chemistries for Crop Protection

Driven by pest resistance and the ever changing demands of the market place, the discovery of new modes of action and lead chemistries with the potential to evolve into novel agricultural products is of prime importance to any crop protection discovery program. One proven inspirational resource for hypotheses which can unearth new agriculturally relevant lead chemistries is the medicinal literature. With the tremendous amount of basic and applied research being conducted to understand as well as exploit mammalian biology, biochemistry and the pathogens that act on them, new therapeutic modes of action, target site ligands and/or biologically privileged chemical motifs continually find their way to the open literature. In this paper some strategies to exploit this wealth of information to identify novel insecticidal and fungicidal lead chemistries will be discussed. Several case studies will be given to illustrate some of the advantages and drawbacks in this lead generation approach.