Dear Colleagues,

Natural product scaffolds underpin many effective antimalarial cures, including quinine, lapachol and artemisinin. Although the past decades have seen a decline in the disease incidence attributable to artemisinin combination therapy and insecticide-treated bed-nets, there is growing concern of a comeback due to the emergence of drug resistance. This has led to a renewed and urgent focus on antimalarial drug discovery. Natural products provide for an excellent source of lead compounds for many diseases and have been used in traditional ethnopharmacological practices for millennia. Natural products also tend to display multiple mechanisms of action due to the presence of heteroatoms, multiple stereo-centers and conformations, and an inherent affinity for biological receptors. However, despite its already significant, albeit fortuitous contribution to the control of the disease, there is a relative paucity in the number of new natural product scaffolds with promising antimalarial efficacy.

A systematic enquiry into the vast, hitherto untapped, ethnopharmacological knowledge of many endemic regions, could provide vital, novel leads to add to the diminishing repertoire of effective antimalarials. The over-reliance on high-throughput screening ventures has meant that investment on the perhaps more tedious discovery and standardisation of natural product options being de-prioritized. This current Special Issue is intended to initiate a discussion on ways and means to harness this powerful resource through a systematic evaluation of natural product-based antimalarial leads in conjunction with the already available rich ethnopharmacological patient-based data from endemic regions, so as to identify scaffolds that are most likely to yield effective outcomes.

Dr. Priyanka Panwar
Prof. Niroshini Nirmalan
Guest Editors

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• Malaria
• Plasmodium falciparum
• Natural products
• Drug discovery
• Antimalarials
• Plant origin