It's 5 minutes of research if you know what you're looking for. It can be much more if you don't, and you don't know when and where to stop.

BTW, that's kind of the entire point of a site like HN. Experts from different fields (and hobbyists and laypersons) get together and exchange knowledge. Sorry to go on about this, but I've been seeing too many responses saying to go Google things.

My question was specifically about drugs that had passed safety and efficacy trials that were derived from the Amazon. Doing 5 minutes if searching and looking at your links it looks like quinine and curare are two of them. There was some mentions of some potential agents, but none that had made it through full clinical trials to be FDA approved. Quinine was first used for malaria treatment over 400 years ago. Two drugs over 400 years doesn’t seem like a lot.

And it doesn’t seem that it will get higher. My impression of modern pharmaceutical research is that instead of focusing on natural medicinal compounds, it is more focused on discovering the exact mechanisms behind various disease processes and synthesizing molecules that either slow down or speed up key pathways along those processes.

> There are many more if you are willing to do five minutes of research

but thats also how you end up on a geocities site about anti vaxxing because big pharma doesn't want you to know about the amazon and yell "exactly, I knew it all along!"