With tens of thousands of plant species on earth, we are endowed with an enormous wealth of medicinal remedies from Mother Nature. Natural products and their derivatives represent more than 50% of all the drugs in modern therapeutics. Because of the low success rate and huge capital investment need, the research and development of conventional drugs are very costly and difficult. Over the past few decades, researchers have focused on drug discovery from herbal medicines or botanical sources, an important group of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy. With a long history of herbal usage for the clinical management of a variety of diseases in indigenous cultures, the success rate of developing a new drug from herbal medicinal preparations should, in theory, be higher than that from chemical synthesis. While the endeavor for drug discovery from herbal medicines is “experience driven,” the search for a therapeutically useful synthetic drug, like “looking for a needle in a haystack,” is a daunting task. In this paper, we first illustrated various approaches of drug discovery from herbal medicines. Typical examples of successful drug discovery from botanical sources were given. In addition, problems in drug discovery from herbal medicines were described and possible solutions were proposed. The prospect of drug discovery from herbal medicines in the postgenomic era was made with the provision of future directions in this area of drug development.

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Contrast agent, one of the most commonly used drugs in interventional radiology, is mainly used for visualizing blood flow and body cavities. 1 Contrast-induced acute injury is one of the main causes of acute renal failure during hospitalization, and it is a serious complication of coronary angiography (CAG) and percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). 2 Contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN) is a serious complication during the procedure of CAG and PCI. 3,4 Previous research has shown that CIN is associated with events such as increased risk of renal replacement therapy (RRT), prolonged