The Era of Natural Product
Many medicinal plant extracts are now used as prescription drugs in many countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, China, and France. The use of medicinal plants for health promotion and treatment of diseases is more and more popular. Creative Biolabs uses omics tools and professional technology to help you find the active ingredients in natural products. At the same time, we provide comprehensive analysis methods to help you develop new psychotropic drugs.
Fig.1 Two examples of successful stories of plant natural products that are being used in hospitals and clinics for disease treatment. (Thomford, 2018)
The Function of Plants in CNS
Facing global public health challenges, natural product research and development plays a very important role in the discovery of innovative drugs. Plants can be found in nearly every land. Making full use of these plants is a viable resource which means more compounds for activity on the central nervous system (CNS) can be found.
It stimulates and then depresses the nervous system, both at central and peripheral levels. Its action is close to that of neurotoxins, which act at the level of sodium channels, making the repolarization difficult.
It would have the net effect of raising dopamine levels in the CNS, thus alleviating symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The ability to stimulate the release of dopamine from striatal cells also has been reported.
Atropine and scopolamine act as CNS depressants and competitively antagonize muscarinic cholinergic receptors.
It appears that their pharmacological activity profiles, active constituents, and modes of action are unlike those of any known CNS active drugs.
The activities of Melissa officinalis leaf extracts that may be therapeutic for Alzheimer's disease include its antioxidant effects and binding to muscarinic and nicotinic receptors in vitro, which suggests that favorable effects on cholinergic function may occur in patients with Alzheimer's disease.
What We Can Provide?
Innovative drug discovery from natural products needs multidisciplinary ways. A systems biology guided approach provides a different angle in natural product pharma-sciences. It paves the way for innovative drug design and leads to better drug candidates.
Genomic methods are important in establishing an accurate identification method for plants and natural product species. Markers developed from species through genomic techniques can be incorporated into DNA chips to provide an effective, high-throughput tool for genotyping and also plant species authentication.
Proteomics is an effective way to elucidate multi-target effects of complex natural product preparations as well as the discovery of multiple compounds and fractions, characterization of natural products, and ultimately a molecular diagnostic platform.
Metabonomics approach to profiling natural products for drug discovery has been hailed as a critical phenotyping tool. The systems biology approach of this technique positions the profiling of natural products in an all-inclusive manner in terms of metabolite and biology systems effect.
Fig.2 Exploiting the properties of plant extracts in the development of novel medicines inspired by compounds found in medicinal plant extracts. (Thomford, 2018)
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Big Data for Natural Product Drug Development and Precision Medicine
The use of computational platforms such as bioinformatics and multivariate statistical tools will allow the application of omics multi-data to elucidate pathophysiological effects, target specificity, and molecular effects, as well as to elucidate the pharmacodynamic, pharmacokinetic, and toxicological characterization of natural products and their compounds.
Creative Biolabs uses technological advances to help our clients to understand the profiles of these complex natural products with the potential to discover new psychotropic drugs. If you have any questions, please contact us.
Reference
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Thomford, Nicholas.; et al. Natural Products for Drug Discovery in the 21st Century: Innovations for Novel Drug Discovery. International journal of molecular sciences. 2018,19(6). Distributed under Open Access license CC BY 4.0, without modification.
For Research Use Only.
