New Perspectives on How to Discover Drugs from Herbal Medicines: CAM's Outstanding Contribution to Modern Therapeutics

Abstract

With tens of thousands of plant species on earth, we are endowed with an enormous wealth of medicinal remedies from Mother Nature. Natural products and their derivatives represent more than 50% of all the drugs in modern therapeutics. Because of the low success rate and huge capital investment need, the research and development of conventional drugs are very costly and difficult. Over the past few decades, researchers have focused on drug discovery from herbal medicines or botanical sources, an important group of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy. With a long history of herbal usage for the clinical management of a variety of diseases in indigenous cultures, the success rate of developing a new drug from herbal medicinal preparations should, in theory, be higher than that from chemical synthesis. While the endeavor for drug discovery from herbal medicines is “experience driven,” the search for a therapeutically useful synthetic drug, like “looking for a needle in a haystack,” is a daunting task. In this paper, we first illustrated various approaches of drug discovery from herbal medicines. Typical examples of successful drug discovery from botanical sources were given. In addition, problems in drug discovery from herbal medicines were described and possible solutions were proposed. The prospect of drug discovery from herbal medicines in the postgenomic era was made with the provision of future directions in this area of drug development.

Biochemical parameters as indicators of antihypertensive efficacy of leaf aqueous extract of Tridax procumbens (Lin) in L-NAME induced hypertensive rats

“…This practice gradually waned with the development of synthetic drugs; however, despite the great advances observed in orthodox medicines, plants still make an important contribution to health care in most of the developing countries [12,13]. Although the mechanism of actions of these plants remedies is reportedly often lacking [13]. Tridax procumbens (Linn.…”

Endophytic fungi residing in medicinal plants have the ability to produce the same or similar pharmacologically active secondary metabolites as their hosts

“…Nearly all vascular plant species studied were found to harbor endophytic bacteria and/or fungi (Rodriguez et al, 2009;Hardoim et al, 2015). They are found to be ural products, have been used to treat various ailments and have been the foundation for discovery and development of modern therapeutics (Pan et al, 2013). Up to 80 % of people in developing countries are totally dependent on herbal drugs for their primary healthcare.…”

GC-MS profiling and antidepressant-like effect of the extracts of Hamelia patens in animal model

“…The search for novel therapeutic natural plants that mitigate depressive illness has been extensively explored over the past decade (Lavretsky, 2009;Qureshi and Al-Bedah, 2013). Thus, developing an effective and safe chemical compound that originates from traditional medicinal herbal remedies may provide a methodology to minimize adverse side effects and to shorten the entire process and reduce the cost of drug discovery compared with chemistry based drug discovery (Pan et al, 2013).…”