This book delves into the vital role of plants and their bioactive compounds in human health, emphasizing their medicinal and nutritional significance. It highlights the growing concern of drug resistance in anticancer and antimicrobial medications, compelling clinicians, and researchers worldwide to seek alternative solutions. Plants offer a diverse array of compounds, serving as a promising resource for novel and safe drug candidates and potentially enhancing drug efficacy while being easily metabolized in the human body. Their cost-effectiveness, safety profile, and minimal side effects make them an ideal source for developing new drug regimens. The book aims to attract students, teachers, and researchers across various disciplines, covering topics such as biochemistry, pharmacology, botany, medicinal chemistry, virology, nutrition, clinical biochemistry, and biomedicine. The book will explore the medicinal and nutritional importance of plants and their products, showcasing their applications in medicine, industries, cosmetics, therapeutics, and preventive measures.

This volume sheds new light on the immense potential of medicinal plants for human health from different technological aspects. It presents new research on bioactive compounds in medicinal plants that provide health benefits, including those that have proven especially effective in treating and managing diabetes mellitus and hypertension. It looks at the medicinal properties, antioxidant capacity, and antimicrobial activity of plants and provides scientific evidence on the use of medicinal plants in the treatment of certain diseases. Many of the plants described in the chapters are easily accessible and are believed to be effective with fewer side effects in comparison to modern drugs in the treatment of different diseases.

Early anthropological evidence for plant use as medicine is 60,000 years old as reported from the Neanderthal grave in Iraq. The importance of plants as medicine is further supported by archeological evidence from Asia and the Middle East. Today, around 1.4 billion people in South Asia alone have no access to modern health care, and rely instead on traditional medicine to alleviate various symptoms. On a global basis, approximately 50 to 80 thousand plant species are used either natively or as pharmaceutical derivatives for life-threatening conditions that include diabetes, hypertension and cancers. As the demand for plant-based medicine rises, there is an unmet need to investigate the quality, safety and efficacy of these herbals by the “scientific methods”. Current research on drug discovery from medicinal plants involves a multifaceted approach combining botanical, phytochemical, analytical, and molecular techniques. For instance, high throughput robotic screens have been developed by industry; it is now possible to carry out 50,000 tests per day in the search for compounds, which act on a key enzyme or a subset of receptors. This and other bioassays thus offer hope that one may eventually identify compounds for treating a variety of diseases or conditions. However, drug development from natural products is not without its problems. Frequent challenges encountered include the procurement of raw materials, the selection and implementation of appropriate high-throughput bioassays, and the scaling-up of preparative procedures. Research scientists should therefore arm themselves with the right tools and knowledge in order to harness the vast potentials of plant-based therapeutics. The main objective of Plant and Human Health is to serve as a comprehensive guide for this endeavor. Volume 1 highlights how humans from specific areas or cultures use indigenous plants. Despite technological developments, herbal drugs still occupy a preferential place in a majority of the population in the third world and have slowly taken roots as alternative medicine in the West. The integration of modern science with traditional uses of herbal drugs is important for our understanding of this ethnobotanical relationship. Volume 2 deals with the phytochemical and molecular characterization of herbal medicine. Specifically, it focuess on the secondary metabolic compounds, which afford protection against diseases. Lastly, Volume 3 discusses the physiological mechanisms by which the active ingredients of medicinal plants serve to improve human health. Together this three-volume collection intends to bridge the gap for herbalists, traditional and modern medical practitioners, and students and researchers in botany and horticulture.

This volume focuses on the importance of therapeutically active compounds of natural origin. Natural materials from plants, microbes, animals, marine organisms and minerals are important sources of modern drugs. Beginning with two chapters on the development and definition of the interdisciplinary field of pharmacognosy, the volume offers up-to-date information on natural and biosynthetic sources of drugs, classification of crude drugs, pharmacognosical botany, examples of medical application, WHO ́s guidelines and intellectual property rights for herbal products.

This volume looks at the importance of medicinal plants and their potential benefits for human health, providing insight with scientific evidence on the use of functional foods in the treatment and management of certain diseases. Divided into four sections, the volume covers the assessment and identification of medicinal plants, the role of medicinal plants in disease management, the ethnobotany and phytochemistry of medicinal plants, and novel applications of plants. Assessment of Medicinal Plants for Human Health: Phytochemistry, Disease Management, and Novel Applications sheds light on the potential of certain plants and will be of value to faculty and advanced-level students of natural products, food science, pharmacognosy, pharmacology, and biochemistry. It will also be of interest to researchers in the area of drug discovery and development.

This book starts with a general introduction to phytochemistry, followed by chapters on plant constituents, their origins and chemistry, but also discussing animal-, microorganism- and mineral-based drugs. Further chapters cover vitamins, food additives and excipients as well as xenobiotics and poisons. The book also explores the herbal approach to disease management and molecular pharmacognosy and introduces methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis of plant constituents. Phytochemicals are classified as primary (e.g. carbohydrates, lipids, amino acid derivations, etc.) or secondary (e.g. alkaloids, terpenes and terpenoids, phenolic compounds, glycosides, etc.) metabolites according to their metabolic route of origin, chemical structure and function. A wide variety of primary and secondary phytochemicals are present in medicinal plants, some of which are active phytomedicines and some of which are pharmaceutical excipients.

Frontiers in Medicinal Chemistry is a book series devoted to reviews on research topics relevant to medicinal chemistry and allied disciplines. Frontiers in Medicinal Chemistry covers developments in rational drug design, bioorganic chemistry, high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry, compound diversity measurements, drug absorption, drug distribution, metabolism, new and emerging drug targets, natural products, pharmacogenomics, chemoinformatics, and structure-activity relationships. This book series is essential for any medicinal chemist who wishes to be updated on the latest and the most important advances in the field.This is the tenth volume of the series. The extensive volume brings 11 reviews on a variety of topics including anti-cancer drug therapeutics, food chemistry, toxicology and drug development strategies. The list of topics in this volume includes:Isoxazole derivatives as potential pharmacophore for new drug developmentContemporary trends in drug repurposing: identifying new targets for existing drugsPharmaceutical potential of pyrimidines as antiviral agentsDrugs and phytochemicals targeting cancerHarnessing the neurological properties of indian brain health booster brahmiCarcinogenicity of hexavalent chromium and its effectsMedicinal plants: a future of modern medical systemShikonin, a naphthaquinone of commercial importance: its biosynthesis and prospect for use as drugsFast foods: chemical composition and implications for healthImplications of DNA-acting agents as anticarcinogenic potential in breast cancer therapeuticsAloe vera - a medicinal plant as potential therapeutic agents for liver cancer