Medical Ethnobotany and the Discovery of New Drugs for Antibiotic Resistant Infections

Rates of multidrug resistant bacterial infections in both the community and healthcare setting are on the rise, making certain drug resistant pathogens a top public health concern. Nevertheless, the number of new antibiotic leads in the pipeline is diminishing, and many scientists have put out a call for the discovery and development of a new class of drugs which could mediate microbial pathogenicity rather than growth and survival. One example of this is the staphylococcal quorum-sensing pathway, controlled by the accessory gene regulator (agr) system, which as a global regulator of staphylococcal virulence. Likewise, other pathogenesis factors such as microbial biofilms, which confer a state of intrinsic resistance in infections, are recognized as high value targets in drug discovery initiatives.

Thus, while the scientific community has established new targets for screening efforts, the question of where to find the best drug candidates remains. Our laboratory takes an ethnobotanical approach to drug discovery. We focus our screening efforts on those medicinal plants used in traditional medicine for the treatment of infectious disease. Here, I will discuss how we employ methods from medical ethnobotany to identify, extract and study medicinal plants in effort to discover and develop the next generation of anti-infective drugs for antibiotic resistant infections.