Tramadol Turns Out to Be a Natural Product

Every so often reports appear that some synthetic compound actually turns out to be a natural product. Sometimes these make very little sense, and turn out to be analytical mistakes (as with this report of nevirapine). But sometimes they're right. This one looks as if it's right, though. Nauclea latifola, known colloquially as the "African peach", apparently has tramadol in it. That's pretty interesting, since tramadol was previously known as a synthetic opioid agonist (among other activities), used as an analgesic since the 1970s. Fittingly, preparations from this same species show up in a number of traditional medicine mixtures in West Africa, and there have also been numerous reports that extracts of the tree's roots have an analgesic effect. This work was done through classic natural-products work: fractionate the root, test the fractions for activity in a rodent assay, home in on the active fraction and see what compounds are in it. It's always good to read about this sort of thing working - a lot of natural products were discovered this way in earlier days, but it's gotten harder over the years. Too often, there will be some extract that shows activity, which would be worth following up on if it concentrated, but none of the fractions are then particularly interesting. Here's a writeup at Chemistry World: Our results indicate that high amounts of the analgesic drug, tramadol, can be obtained through a simple extraction procedure from Nauclea latifolia found in Camero...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Natural Products Source Type: blogs