What All Should Know about Plant Drugs

Before the beginning of the twentieth century, the discovery of drug entities for the treatment of human diseases was mainly a matter of “hit or miss” use in humans, based on folklore claims. Many of our earliest therapeutic remedies were derived from plants or plant extracts that had been administered to ailing patients (e.g., quinine from cinchona tree bark for treating malaria in the mid-1600s and digitalis from the foxglove plant in the mid-1700s for the treatment of heart failure, to name a few). Undoubtedly, some of these early medications were truly effective and with gradual passage of time several developments were made in the field of phytochemical research. Keeping a pace with the developments, scientists from various academia and pharmaceutical giants were actively pursuing purified plant extracts and pure compounds derived from plant sources (e.g., digitalis, Rauwolfia alkaloids, taxol, artemisinin, etc.) as human medicaments. During the mid of the twentieth century impressive discoveries were made in the fields of cardiovascular, inflammatory, central nervous system and metabolic diseases (especially diabetes); medicinal chemists and pharmacologists set up programs and clinical trials to discover new and improved antianxiety agents, antidepressants, tranquilizers, antihypertensive agents etc. However due to the complex nature of the leads obtained from natural products and absence of proper analytical tools and instrumental facilities, a gradual decline in interest in the area of botanical drug discovery has been noticed. All these major issues pertaining to botanical drug discovery has been presented here in details.