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eCAM Advance Access published online on June 24, 2008
eCAM, doi:10.1093/ecam/nen036
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Review

Therapeutic Potential of Plants as Anti-microbials for Drug Discovery

Ramar Perumal Samy and Ponnampalam Gopalakrishnakone

Venom and Toxin Research Programme, Department of Anatomy, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore – 117597

The uses of traditional medicinal plants for primary health care have steadily increased worldwide in recent years. Scientists are in search of new phytochemicals that could be developed as useful anti-microbials for treatment of infectious diseases. Currently, out of 80% of pharmaceuticals derived from plants, very few are now being used as anti-microbials. Plants are rich in a wide variety of secondary metabolites that have found anti-microbial properties. This review highlights the current status of traditional medicine, its contribution to modern medicine, recent trends in the evaluation of anti-microbials with a special emphasis upon some tribal medicine, in vitro and in vivo experimental design for screening, and therapeutic efficacy in safety and human clinical trails for commercial outlet. Many of these commercially available compounds are crude preparations administered without performing human clinical trials. Recent methods are useful to standardize the extraction for scientific investigation of new phytochemicals and anti-microbials of traditionally used plants. It is concluded that once the local ethnomedical preparations of traditional sources are scientifically evaluated before dispensing they should replace existing drugs commonly used for the therapeutic treatment of infection. This method should be put into practice for future investigations in the field of ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry, ethnobotany and other biological fields for drug discovery.

Keywords: ethnopharmacology – human clinical trails – phytochemicals – secondary metabolites – traditional medicine

For reprints and all correspondence: Prof. P. Gopalakrishnakone, Venom and Toxin Research Programme, Department of Anatomy, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, MD 10, 4 Medical Drive, National University of Singapore, Singapore – 117597. Tel: +65 - 65163207; Fax: +65 - 67787643; E-mail: antgopal{at}nus.edu.sg

Received April 12, 2007; accepted April 18, 2008


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