Editorial: Plant products for antiviral therapeutics (ouvre dans un nouvel onglet)

Résumé

Editorial on the Research Topic Plant products for antiviral therapeuticsDiseases caused by microbial infections continue to pose major public health challenges despite the enormous modernization of therapeutic strategies to alleviate human health disorders.From time to time, numerous such afflictions due to HIV, hepatitis B & C, herpes simplex, dengue, Ebola, and influenza viruses raised universal concern, underscored by the recent COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 (Mandal et al., 2021).Although some antiviral drugs or cocktails of drugs are available to combat these viruses, nevertheless, most of these medications showed side effects and other drawbacks like low antiviral activity, genotype-dependent efficacy, and the emergence of drug-resistant mutants.Therefore, the development of more suitable therapeutics in this field is certainly a need of the hour.Historically, medicinal herbs and natural products are the mainstay of general healthcare systems around the globe and are considered an integral part of the cultural heritage of mankind.Truly, the plant kingdom is an invaluable repository of countless phytochemicals with distinctive molecular frameworks, which provide clues on the core structures as templates for the development of novel drug molecules.Thus, quite a number of such traditional medicinal plants yielded a variety of drugs enlisted in the modern pharmacopeia.In fact, a substantial number of FDA-approved drugs are based on natural products or their derivatives (Atanasov et al., 2021).Time-honoured herbal prescriptions practised worldwide, such as Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCM), Indian Ayurvedic and Middle-eastern Unani systems, and various regional folkloric treatments in Africa and elsewhere continue to fulfil basic healthcare requirements in developing countries (Mandal et al., 2020).As for the Western people, a resurgence in popularity of natural products for health promotion have been observed in the past few decades (World Health Organization, 2019).In fact, many medicinal plant extracts are now prescribed for the treatment of chronic ailments.Therefore, a strategic approach to combat viral infections would be to explore the

Mots-clés

• #pharmacological effects of natural compounds
• #natural product bioactivities and synthesis
• #toxin mechanisms and immunotoxins
• #medicine
• #pharmacology
• #computational biology
• #biology