Plants as a Source of Lead Structures and Drugs

The contribution of plants to modern medicine can hardly be overstated. Many plant natural products are used in medicine in their native, undomesticated form and the anti-Alzheimer s alkaloid galanthamine and the anticancer diterpenoid paclitaxel are additions to the inventory of plant-derived drugs obtained by direct isolation.101 

However, the majority of natural products were not created to meet human needs and domestication in the form of chemical manipulation is required to increase potency, improve selectivity and reach a clinically acceptable pharmacokinetic and safety profile. Thus, while antibiotics are generated by microorganisms to fight other microorganisms and can be employed clinically to do so, natural cytotoxic agents are not produced to kill cancer cells and they 

Owing to the ready availability of plant biomasses and the high concentration that certain secondary compounds can attain in their natural producer, plant products can also contribute to drug discovery as molecular platforms for the tailored expansion of chemical diversity by combinatorial-style modification. 

Several attempts have also been reported to integrate natural products and combinatorial synthesis, either by using natural products as scaffolds for combinatorial modification or by building libraries of natural product-like 

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