This review provides an overview on the active phytochemical constituents of medicinal plants that are traditionally used to manage cancer in Ethiopia. A total of 119 articles published between 1968 and 2020 have been reviewed, using scientific search engines such as ScienceDirect, PubMed, and Google Scholar. Twenty-seven medicinal plant species that belong to eighteen families are documented along with their botanical sources, potential active constituents, and in vitro and in vivo activities against various cancer cells. The review is compiled and discusses the potential anticancer, antiproliferative, and cytotoxic agents based on the types of secondary metabolites, such as terpenoids, phenolic compounds, alkaloids, steroids, and lignans. Among the anticancer secondary metabolites reported in this review, only few have been isolated from plants that are originated and collected in Ethiopia, and the majority of compounds are reported from plants belonging to different areas of the world. Thus, based on the available bioactivity reports, extensive and more elaborate ethnopharmacology-based bioassay-guided studies have to be conducted on selected traditionally claimed Ethiopian anticancer plants, which inherited from a unique and diverse landscape, with the aim of opening a way forward to conduct anticancer drug discovery program.
Soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH), one of 20 neglected tropical diseases, afflicts about a quarter of the world’s population. A handful of medications, albendazole, mebendazole, pyrantel pamoate, levamisole, and ivermectin, have long constituted the cornerstone of therapy for these infections in both humans and animals. The continuous and long-term reliance on these small range of compounds has led to the emergence of drug resistance in many helminthic strains in animals. The threat of resistance also seems inevitable in humans thereby hampering the World Health Organization’s efforts to control or eradicate these neglected tropical illnesses. Hence, there is an urgent need for the discovery and development of new treatment options with broad spectrum activity against various helmintic infections that act via novel mechanisms of action. Different strategies are employed in this endeavor which include the identification of promising compounds from natural and synthetic origin, drug repurposing and modification of existing drugs, and vaccine development. The prospect of a “pan-anthelmintic vaccine” also seems encouraging, despite the various obstacles facing the development of vaccines. Here we discuss drug discovery and development efforts for STH.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.