Plant sources, drugs from

Escohotado, Antonio. (1999). A Brief History of Drugs From the Stone Age to the Stoned Age. Rochester Park Street Press. Ott, Jonathan. (1993). Pharmacotheon Entheogenic drugs, their plant sources and history. Kennewick, WA Natural Products Co. 

Those who have worked through earlier parts of this chapter will have no difficulty in predicting that the body is likely to treat chemicals from plant sources as just one more set of chemical invaders that should be handled in exactly the same way as foods and Western-style medicinal drugs. 

CE133 Matsuda, H., S. Nakamura, and M. Kubo. Studies on cuticle drugs from natural sources. II. Inhibitory effect of Prunus plants on melanin biosynthesis. Biol Pharm Bull 1994 17(10) 1417-1420. 

Figure 3.2 Drugs from natural sources different molecules can be isolated from the leaves, stems, and roots. From each of these sources, extracts conducted with solvents with different polarities will yield different natural products. This complex extraction system ensures the identification of all possible candidate molecules from a plant source.

Today foxglove is still the source of digitoxin, a widely used drug that increases the force of the heart s contraction. To produce it chemists separate and purify one compound from the plant s roughly thirty cardiac glycosides, each of which has different activity. Manufacturers of herbal supplements do not note such distinctions they merely try to justify their products by pointing out that many of our prescription pharmaceuticals derive from plant sources. 

Natural products have been, and remain, a rich source of leads for the pharmaceutical industry and many marketed drugs are either natural products or are modifications of such substances. Hence, considerable effort is spent in isolating and characterising chemicals from natural sources which can be tested in a variety of biological screens. Often, it is necessary to carry out laborious extraction and purification steps and the advent of directly coupled HPLC-NMR has been explored as an alternative technique for natural product identification. The use of HPLC-NMR, and other hyphenated techniques such as HPLC-MS-MS, for identification of natural products from plant sources has been reviewed by Wolfender and co-workers [40,41],... 

Plant-based drugs for Parkinson s disease include L-dopa, which comes from sources such as the seeds of Mucunapruriens and Vincia faba. L-dopa is the chemical compound that has been used for Parkinson s disease for the last 30 years. 

The oriental crude drug Ma Huang or Mao, prepared from certain species of the genus Ephedra, contains ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, and homologous compounds (2). Although alkaloids of the ephedrine type occur in several Ephedra species, only a few other plant sources are known (Table IV and V). 

Aslam, M., Jafri, M.A., Javed, K. and Singh, S. (2003) Evaluation of antidiabetic drugs from plant sources. In Singh, S., Govil, J.N. and Singh, V.K. (eds) Recent Progress in Medicinal Plants. Volume 2, Phytochemistry and Pharmacology. Studium Press, Houston, Texas, pp. 105. 

The description of drug substances isolated from animal (including human) sources, should contain (a) species and organ(s) or tissue(s) used, (b) statement(s) demonstrating compliance with USD A or other applicable requirements, and (c) information corresponding to items c-g for plant-derived drug substances described above. 

In spite of the many studies on isolation, activity, and synthesis of natural antifeedants, the number of compounds commercially available remains low, often due to their cost of isolation, availability of the plant source, or low persistence in field conditions. To overcome these drawbacks, much research is conducted on structure—activity relationships (SAR). The rationale behind these studies is to discover the correlation between biological activity and chemical structure and to draw from that optimum structures having both the activity, stability, and selectivity for maximum feeding deterrence.4 5 SAR are much used in drug design6 and have been applied to insecticides.7... 

D. G. I. Kingston, Taxol and Other Anticancer Agents from Plants" in J. D. Coombes, Ed., New Drugs from Natural Sources, IBC Technical Services, 1992, pp. 101-108. 

Herbs are specifically defined as non-woody, low-growing plants such as basil and parsley. Herbal medicine is considered to be the use of crude drugs of plant origin to treat illness or to promote health. A more correct term for this would be botanical medicine. Phytomedicinals are those common preparations, including capsules, tablets, tinctures, and fluidextracts that have been prepared from plant sources. This should be distinguished from plant-derived drugs that have been isolated, purified, and standardized from plant sources. 

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