Drugs of Abuse: Natural Drugs

NATURAL DRUGS

For thousands of years, natural products have played a very significant role in health care and prevention of diseases. The prehistoric civilizations of the Indians, Chinese and North Africans provide inscribed evidence for the use of natural sources for curing many diseases. Conventional natural product chemistry approaches facilitated a vast selection of bio-active secondary metabolites from terrestrial and marine sources to be discovered. 

Natural products have been the most effective source of potential drug leads. Natural products once assisted humanity as the source of all drugs, and higher plants provided most of these therapeutic agents. 

However, it was not until the 19th century that scientists isolated active components from various medicinal plants. 

• Friedrich Serturner isolated morphine from Papaver somniferum in 1806, and since then natural products have been widely selected for their medicinal purposes. 
• Atropine obtained from Atropa belladonna, strychnine, a Central Nervous System stimulant,
• Ziconotide, identified from a cone snail, Conus magus, and Taxol are a few examples of active components taken out from natural sources. 

Drug detection from the usual sources mostly involves two methodologies, principal one is chemically determined which is discovery natural activities for disinfected complexes and second is the biologically driven in which bioassay‐guided approach starts with crude extracts or it can be combination of the both. Natural product chemistry is one of the oldest branches of the chemical sciences, its origin dating back to the first decades of the 19th century, or even before. 

Natural Products act as lead molecules for the synthesis of various potent drugs. Natural products entities depend not only on plants but also on other form of life like algae, fungus, sponges, molluscs, etc. Microorganisms have been widely screened for antibiotics since Fleming’s discovery of the antibacterial activity of Penicillium.

Let us learn about more Natural Drugs in the given video lecture