How are therapeutic agents discovered in plants?

[revolut]

I was just wondering how are medicines/chemicals realised in the floral kingdom. How would researchers know that a particular floral species might/will have medicinal use? The discussion might just lead to the history of how man used the natural environment to treat various diseased states. I do know that modern pharmacy comprises synthesizing and compounding chemicals for therapeutic purposes on a large scale. However, what are the processes that lead to that production? Additionally, are all of modern medicine derived from the floral kingdom?

[ecoli]

Trial and error, I believe. although I think a lot of it ma come from testing the validity of "old wives tales" and "alternative medicines," many of which actually work.

[DV8 2XL]

I read somewhere there is a bit of a stink developing over drug companies getting information on traditional herbal medicines from Third World countries for free, then being unwilling to sell western drugs and antibiotics at cut prices back to these same places. Apparently some governments are talking about invoking intellectual property law in this matter.

[Helix]

Scientists can look to nature and see what are different animal behaviors and then determine if they have medical value. So, for example, there's a pain killer (Prialt) that uses a compund found in a cone-snail. The snail uses this venom to immobilize its victim before eating it. Scientists who wanted to find a natural pain-killing compund looked, logically, to animals like this rather than a deer or goat.

[YT2095]

Wicca.

 

in some form or another, most all of it derives from there, be it a Witch a Shaman a Voodoo preistess etc...

it`s all Magik!

 

then of course comes along some guy with a Mass Spectrometer and takes the Magik appart to its componant bits, applies a little logi(K) lol and gets the active ingredient(s) from it.

 

budda bing,,, you have a "New" drug

 

Wicca btw, is where the word Witch comes from, Wicca only means Wise and so Whitch craft, simple is the craft of the Wise, nothing spooky or wierd

[revolut]

I agree that probably a portion of medicine derived from anecdotal evidence, as mentioned by ecoli. Possibly from archaic texts from the chinese, egyptians. greeks etc. using western scienctific methods (as methodologies from descartes, newton etc) the info is further probed into, and progressively developed into our modern view of medicine (with discoveries along the way like penicilin, technology, DNA and stuff). still, is there the value or a level of predictability in the drug discovery, such that we can postulate that certain species in a particular genus may contain therapeutic agents because of certain mechanisms we know present in the genus?

[DV8 2XL]

The short answer to that is all of medicine is more of an art than a science. That is, there no three ring binder with a process written in it for producing a new therapeutic agent. There are sets of tools and there are empirical techniques that are used, plus a good bit of serendipity to discover a new drug.

[Helix]

The short answer to that is all of medicine is more of an art than a science. That is, there no three ring binder with a process written in it for producing a new therapeutic agent. There are sets of tools and there are empirical techniques that are used, plus a good bit of serendipity to discover a new drug.

 

 

That's a good way of putting it. For all the memorization it takes to become a scientist, and to become a good one at that, blind luck and determination forged many of the discoveries we see today.