Aspirin began as willow bark. The contraceptive pill began as a Mexican yam. A front-line cancer drug began as the bark of a Pacific yew. Four decades of approvals show the botanical root runs deeper than most people assume.
The most-cited number in pharmacognosy comes from Newman and Cragg. Across nearly four decades of FDA approvals — January 1981 to September 2019 — they found that natural products, their direct derivatives, and synthetic drugs designed around a natural-product pharmacophore account for roughly 65% of all small-molecule drugs approved in that period.
Counted more strictly, 1,059 of the 1,881 new drugs approved in that window — about 56% — are natural products, direct derivatives, or carry the pharmacophore of an active secondary metabolite. The exact percentage moves with the definition. The direction does not: the pharmacy is still, in large part, a herbarium.
Share of small-molecule approvals (1981–2019) with a natural-product origin, on the broad Newman–Cragg classification.
A short anthology of source organism, molecule, and use — the journey from field to formulary.
If two-thirds of the pharmacopeia begins in a plant, the divide between "botanical" and "scientific" beauty is largely false. A botanical active is a chemical story — it simply has a named origin and a chain of custody. That is the whole of our method: find a documented active, trace it to a named place and partnership, and let the molecule do the work it has always done. The forest got there first; the laboratory caught up.
The headline proportions are from Newman & Cragg's Natural Products as Sources of New Drugs over the Nearly Four Decades from 01/1981 to 09/2019 (Journal of Natural Products, 2020), the standard reference in the field, and a 2024 review summarising it. The ~65% figure uses the broad classification (natural products, derivatives, and natural-product-pharmacophore synthetics); the 56% figure is a stricter small-molecule count. The plant-to-drug anthology draws on well-documented histories. We report both percentages because the difference is methodological, not a dispute about the facts.
aichabelle.com/pages/research-plant-medicineOur cabinet is built the way this study reads the pharmacopeia: a documented molecule, traced to a place and a partnership. Read the provenance essays, or open the cabinet.
Open the cabinet Read the Journal