A Review about Scope of Traditional Medicinal Plants in a New Drug Discovery

Abstract

‘AYUSH’ is the most important traditional system of medicine, which has been practised since thousands of long years by our ancestors. AYUSH has a very good healing power for so many problems by using both traditional and natural medicine. The new drug discovery is taking long time to produce its products and thus there is a reduction in number of new drug approvals due to different issues like legal problems or additional effects or the end result and its costs are also very high compared with AYUSH medicines. On doing bio-assay to the identified plant, it may lead to the isolation of a druggable compound called new drug. The success rate is more in herbal medicine than the drug that is chemically synthesized and economically friendly in nature. Mother Nature has an abundant wealth of medicinal plants. About 50% of all modern drugs consist of derivatives of natural products which are derived from medicinal plants. So, since in the recent year’s development, the drug discovery from plant source is more focused than the drugs synthesized chemically. Medicinal plants are highly valued as a source of molecule for therapeutics. The medicinal plant drugs can also act on pharmacological targets like cancer, malaria, HIV and so many harmful diseases to the mankind. The methods used to extract the new drugs from different medicinal plants are proved to be the best successful approaches to discover the new medicinal plants.

Keywords: AYUSH, medicinal plants, drug discovery, bio-assay, therapeutics, pharmacological targets, herbs

Cite this Article

Ananda HV, Priyanka R, Harshitha HC et al. A Review about Scope of Traditional Medicinal Plants in a New Drug Discovery. Research & Reviews: A Journal of Biotechnology. 2017; 7(2):  1–3p.