Unlocking Ethnomedicinal Plant Potentials: Advancing Drug Discovery in the High-Throughput Omics Era

Ethnomedicinal plants have been the source of drugs since the dawn of human civilization. A number of systems of traditional medicine have evolved from the application of ethnomedicinal plants for treating human disorders. Producing drugs from medicinal plants largely relied on chemical techniques like solvent extraction, distillation, fermentation, digestion, decoction, percolation, and chromatography until the advent of omics technologies during the early twenty-first century. The availability of human genome sequence data has propelled drug discovery, where knowledge of disease-susceptibility genes can be used to design drugs with minimal off-target effects. Understanding biochemical pathways using the genome sequence data can help identify new targets for drug development. Sequencing of medicinal plant genomes can help in understanding the metabolite pathways and uncover key intermediates that can be tweaked to enhance the production of bioactive chemicals. Metabolomic approaches are playing a crucial role in discovery of new drug molecules, as a major category of plant drugs are secondary metabolites. Metabolic engineering, combining the power of genetics, biochemistry, and system biology, has facilitated the development of novel drug molecules. Using a semi-synthetic approach to drug production involving metabolic engineering, we can scale up the production of plant-based drugs without negatively affecting endangered or threatened plant species. A lot of plant proteins have been discovered to play a role in combating diseases like cancer, diabetes, HIV, and microbial diseases. Developments in proteomic technologies like 2D-PAGE, mass spectrometry, MALDI-TOF, NMR, and protein interaction networks can minimize the time period required to develop new drugs and help in studying drug interactions and biosafety. We are witnessing a new era in the identification, purification, and production of plant-based medicinal compounds, greatly assisted by omics technologies enabling the mankind to effectively fight against severe and emerging diseases.