Human medicinal agents from plants.

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1995. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Human medicinal agents from plants.

ACS Symp Ser; 534:1-356 1993. Unique Identifier : AIDSLINE ICDB/95615459
Kinghorn AD; Balandrin MF; Coll. of Pharmacy, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL; 60612

Abstract: The records of early medicine are replete with remedies based on plant materials, and to this day, agents derived from plants or based structurally on prototypes of plant origin figure prominently. This book was developed from a symposium sponsored by the Division of Agricultural and Food Chemistry at the 203rd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco, April 5-10, 1992. Forty-eight contributors provided 22 chapters in four general topic areas regarding medicinal agents from plants. The first area is the current role and importance of plant-derived natural products in drug discovery and development. This includes an overview of the topic, and papers on tropical forest biodiversity and potential for new medicinal plants, phytomedicines in Western Europe, the search for new pharmaceuticals and other bioactive natural products, including renewed interest in the pharmaceutical industry, and metabolism in transformed plant tissue cultures. The next topic area on anticancer and cancer chemopreventive agents from plants covers the role of plants in the National Cancer Institute's (NCI's) drug discovery and development program, logistics and politics in plant drug discovery, easy assays, particularly brine shrimp and potato disc assays, for discovering antitumor compounds, taxol, camptothecin and its analogs, agents from Chinese traditional medicine, novel strategies for discovery of plant-derived anticancer agents, and the development of cancer chemopreventive agents from plant sources. The next area covered is anti-infective and antimicrobial chemotherapeutic agents from plants. This deals with NCI research on HIV inhibitory and antitumor natural products, novel prototype antibiotics for opportunistic infections related to AIDS, Artemisia annua as an antimalarial plant, and the search for molluscicidal and larvicidal agents. The final topic area concerns promising plant-derived natural products with multiple biological activities. This includes the potential of algal secondary metabolites, activation of protein kinase C isotypes by phorbol esters, bioactive organosulfur compounds of garlic, and rohitukine and forskolin. There are author, affiliation and subject indices.

Keywords: Antimalarials/*ISOLATION & PURIF/PHARMACOLOGY Antineoplastic Agents/*ISOLATION & PURIF/PHARMACOLOGY Antiviral Agents/*ISOLATION & PURIF/PHARMACOLOGY Human Medicine, Chinese Traditional Plants, Medicinal/*CHEMISTRY MONOGRAPH
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M9581003

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