Stem cells in natural product and medicinal plant drug discovery-An overview of new screening approaches

Abstract

Natural products remain a rich source of new drugs, and the search for bioactive molecules from nature continues to play an important role in the development of new medicines. Also, there is increasing use of herbal medicines for the treatment of a plethora of diseases, and demands for more scientific evidence for their efficacy and safety remains a huge challenge. The propensity of stem cells to differentiate into almost every cell type not only holds promise for the delivery of cell-based therapies for currently incurable diseases or a useful tool in studying cell physiology and pathophysiology. Increasingly, stem cells are becoming an important tool in preclinical drug screening and toxicity testing. In this review, we examine the scientific advances made towards the use of pluripotent stem cells as a model for the screening of plant-based medicines. The combination of well-established in vitro electrophysiological and a plethora of toxicogenomic technologies, together with the optimisation of culture methods of herbal plants and pluripotent stem cells can be explored to establish the basis for efficacy, and tissue/organ-based toxicities of many currently used medicinal plants whose efficacies and toxicities remain unknown.

Keywords: Functional readouts; Natural product; Plant extract; Stem cell.