Natural products as a novel source for antileishmanial drug development

Oral cancer is one of the most common types of cancer, and lifestyle factors like extensive consumption of tobacco, betel quid, and alcohol are the major etiological factors of oral cancer. Treatment of oral cancer includes surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, but this treatment possesses lots of side effects. Therefore, scientists and medical experts are utilizing natural products and medicinal plants for new drug development. Natural products and phytochemicals showed better efficacy with less toxicity. However, most of the phytochemicals showed poor permeability and less bioavailability. To combat this problem, scientists developed nanosized nanoemulsions of phytochemicals to treat various ailments. Nanoemulsions of phytochemicals exhibited better efficacy than their free form due to increased permeability and bioavailability. Numerous phytopharmaceuticals have been formulated for nanoemulsions to date and tested for their anticancer potential against various cancers, including oral cancer and oral health management.

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Cheminformatics techniques in antimalarial drug discovery and development from natural products 1: basic concepts

Physical Sciences Reviews ◽

10.1515/psr-2018-0130 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4 (7) ◽

Author(s):

Samuel Egieyeh ◽

Sarel F. Malan ◽

Alan Christoffels

Keyword(s):

Natural Products ◽

Drug Development ◽

Antimalarial Drug ◽

Drug Discovery And Development ◽

Drug Candidates ◽

Structure Activity ◽

Preclinical And Clinical Studies ◽

Research Cost

Abstract A large number of natural products, especially those used in ethnomedicine of malaria, have shown varying in vitro antiplasmodial activities. Facilitating antimalarial drug development from this wealth of natural products is an imperative and laudable mission to pursue. However, limited manpower, high research cost coupled with high failure rate during preclinical and clinical studies might militate against the pursuit of this mission. These limitations may be overcome with cheminformatic techniques. Cheminformatics involves the organization, integration, curation, standardization, simulation, mining and transformation of pharmacology data (compounds and bioactivity) into knowledge that can drive rational and viable drug development decisions. This chapter will review the application of cheminformatics techniques (including molecular diversity analysis, quantitative-structure activity/property relationships and Machine learning) to natural products with in vitro and in vivo antiplasmodial activities in order to facilitate their development into antimalarial drug candidates and design of new potential antimalarial compounds.

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