Evolving Challenges and Opportunities in Plant-based Drug Discovery and Development

For years, plants retain their historical significance as important sources of novel compounds used directly as therapeutic agents or as sources of new drug precursors/prototypes, vaccines/antibodies, and pharmacological probes with high structural diversity. Despite multiple successful drug discovery examples, as testified by the high percentage of nature-inspired drugs approved over the past three decades, the various challenges encountered in isolating and characterizing biologically active chemicals in plants led progressively pharmaceutical companies to reduce plant-based drug discovery programmes. Nevertheless, recent advances in technologies, analytical instruments, genomics, metabolomics, and computational approaches dismantled the old barriers renewing the interest in plant-based drug discovery, with promising strategies able to guarantee reproducible processes and high-purity and high-quantity compounds. A new multi-disciplinary approach involving botanical, analytical, computational, and medicinal chemistry expertise is therefore required, saving cost and time with enhanced success rate in drug discovery. Here, we focus on the recent and innovative scientific and technological breakthrough, highlight selected innovation, and discuss key opportunities from screening assay to extraction, purification, and analytical procedures, since we believe that these contribute to open a brand-new era in the continuing value of plant-derived products as viable compounds for modern drug development.