Novel antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, and anticancer agents from microbial sources (2023–2026): Chemistry, biosynthesis, and therapeutic potential

Abstract

The growing burden of antimicrobial resistance, emerging viral infections, invasive fungal diseases, and cancer continues to create an urgent demand for new therapeutic agents with novel chemical scaffolds and mechanisms of action. Microbial natural products remain an important source of drug leads; however, many biosynthetic gene clusters remain silent or underexplored, and recent advances in genome mining, synthetic biology, metabolomics, and artificial intelligence have generated a rapidly expanding body of discoveries that requires integrated synthesis. This review aims to summarize and critically discuss recent advances in microbial-derived antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, and anticancer agents reported from 2023 to 2026, with emphasis on their chemistry, biosynthesis, biological activities, and therapeutic potential. The review highlights major discovery platforms, including genome mining, heterologous expression, metabolomics-guided dereplication, molecular networking, and artificial intelligence-assisted biosynthetic prediction. It also discusses key biosynthetic classes, including ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides, nonribosomal peptides, nonribosomal peptide–polyketide hybrids, polyketides, terpenoids, siderophores, metallophores, cyanobacterial metabolites, marine-derived compounds, and fungal natural products. In addition, this review explores the therapeutic relevance of microbial metabolites against bacterial, fungal, viral, and cancer targets, while considering translational challenges such as bioavailability, toxicity, resistance, production yield, and in vivo efficacy. Overall, the review emphasizes the continuing importance of microbial natural products as a chemically diverse and mechanistically innovative resource for future drug discovery.