Professor Herbert Waldmann is Professor of Biochemistry and Head of the Department of Chemical Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology.

Natural products have provided inspiration for chemical biology and medicinal chemistry
research. Their success raises the fundamental question whether the particular structural
and biological properties of natural products can be translated to structurally less
demanding compounds, readily accessible by chemical synthesis and yet still endowed with
pronounced bioactivity.
This lecture will describe a logic for the simplification of natural product structure by means of
“Biology Oriented Synthesis” (BIOS) and its evolution into the “Pseudo Natural Product” (PNP)
concept. Pseudo-natural products can be regarded as the human-made equivalent of natural
product evolution, i.e. the chemical evolution of natural product structure. Application of natural
product inspired compound collections designed and synthesized following these principles in cellbased
phenotypic assays and subsequent identification of the cellular target proteins demonstrate
that the BIOS and PNPs may enable innovation in both chemical biology and medicinal chemistry.