Plant-derived natural products for drug discovery: current approaches and prospects

Abstract

Nature has abundant source of drugs that need to be identified/purified for use as essential biologics, either individually or in combination in the modern medical field. These drugs are divided into small bio-molecules, plant-made biologics, and a recently introduced third category known as phytopharmaceutical drugs. The development of phytopharmaceutical medicines is based on the ethnopharmacological approach, which relies on the traditional medicine system. The concept of 'one-disease one-target drug' is becoming less popular, and the use of plant extracts, fractions, and molecules is the new paradigm that holds promising scope to formulate appropriate drugs. This led to discovering a new concept known as polypharmacology, where natural products from varying sources can engage with multiple human physiology targets. This article summarizes different approaches for phytopharmaceutical drug development and discusses the progress in systems biology and computational tools for identifying drug targets. We review the existing drug delivery methods to facilitate the efficient delivery of drugs to the targets. In addition, we describe different analytical techniques for the authentication and fingerprinting of plant materials. Finally, we highlight the role of biopharming in developing plant-based biologics.

Keywords: Bioavailability; Biopharming; Ethnopharmacology; Natural products; Phytopharmaceutical drugs.

Fig. 1

Schematic representation of herbal drug discovery showing how different approaches are applied based on desired product A Workflow of procedures involved in Ethnopharmacology (EP) and reverse pharmacology (RP) for development of plant-based drugs B Phytochemical evaluation of prepared extracts by high throughput screening (HTS) and fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) for identification of lead molecules and their subsequent utilization in drug development C Integration of polypharmacology (PP) and network pharmacology (NP) approaches for modern drug discovery. C1-C12 in pink color represents different drug compounds and P1-P12 in blue are different protein targets

Fig. 2

Different herbal drug delivery systems