Medicinal plants have historically proven their value as a source of molecules with therapeutic potential, and nowadays still represent an important pool for the identification of novel drug leads. In the past decades, pharmaceutical industry focused mainly on libraries of synthetic compounds as drug discovery source. They are comparably easy to produce and resupply, and demonstrate good compatibility with established high throughput screening (HTS) platforms. However, at the same time there has been a declining trend in the number of new drugs reaching the market, raising renewed scientific interest in drug discovery from natural sources, despite of its known challenges. In this survey, a brief outline of historical development is provided together with a comprehensive overview of used approaches and recent developments relevant to plant-derived natural product drug discovery. Associated challenges and major strengths of natural product-based drug discovery are critically discussed. A snapshot of the advanced plant-derived natural products that are currently in actively recruiting clinical trials is also presented. Importantly, the transition of a natural compound from a "screening hit" through a "drug lead" to a "marketed drug" is associated with increasingly challenging demands for compound amount, which often cannot be met by re-isolation from the respective plant sources. In this regard, existing alternatives for resupply are also discussed, including different biotechnology approaches and total organic synthesis. While the intrinsic complexity of natural product-based drug discovery necessitates highly integrated interdisciplinary approaches, the reviewed scientific developments, recent technological advances, and research trends clearly indicate that natural products will be among the most important sources of new drugs also in the future.

In this feature article recent progress and future perspectives of cascade catalysis combining bio/bio or bio/chemo catalysts are presented.

Halogen Dance (HD) reactions are a useful tool for synthetic chemists as they enable access to positions in aromatic and heteroaromatic systems for subsequent functionalization which are often difficult to address by other methods, hence, allowing entry to versatile scaffolds. While the method can be extremely useful, this transformation is often neglected upon designing synthetic sequences. This may be largely attributed to the lack of comprehensive reference works covering the general principles and outlining the versatility and limitations of the technique. The following review tries to present HD reactions in a clear and concise manner in order to convince more chemists of its advantages. It covers the field of HD reactions from their first observation in 1951 until the present. The important contributions leading to the elucidation of the mechanism are briefly outlined followed by a detailed mechanistic section and a discussion of factors which influence HD reactions. Finally, an overview of HD reactions on various carbocyclic and heterocyclic ring systems and its applications in the synthesis of complex compounds is given.