Medicinal plant derived drugs and their treatment for human diseases like cancer: A review

Abstract

Several medicinal plants have been popularly known and widely used to cure various diseases throughout the planet since ancient times. Various types of plants have been found to cure different kinds of human diseases effectively. Several research are focused on finding specific compounds from medicinal plants that have effective medicinal properties in curing human diseases. Finding the bioactive compounds specific to a disease could help in understanding the properties of the compound towards a disease and thereby its application with more precision and convenience. Understanding the characteristics of the bioactive compound can help in large scale production to be commercially available globally as per the demands and it can direct to design for synthetic production. It will benefit in several ways in terms of reducing the amount of intake as lesser amount would be needed, reducing restriction of availability as the plant grow at certain environmental conditions and overcome inconvenience of transport/portability and preservation and unseasonal availability of the plant. In this short review, plant derived natural products; anticancer properties of cumin from Curcuma longa subsp and the importance of medicinal plants such as Cronton caudatus subsp are highlighted.