Modern Phytomedicine: Turning Medicinal Plants into Drugs

This timely and original handbook paves the way to success in plant-based drug development, systematically addressing the issues facing a pharmaceutical scientist who wants to turn a plant compound into a safe and effective drug. Plant pharmacologists from around the world demonstrate the potentials and pitfalls involved, with many of the studies and experiments reported here published for the first time. The result is a valuable source of information unavailable elsewhere.

Iqbal Ahmad is a senior lecturer of agricultural microbiology at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), India, and Principal Investigator of the Medicinal Plants Research Project of the University Grant Commission, New Delhi, India. A graduate of AMU, he worked as a research scientist at the Himalaya Drug Company before moving to the AMU’s Faculty of Agricultural Sciences. He has so far screened more than 150 traditional Indian medicinal plants for their biological activities and potential prospection.

Farrukh Aqil is Project Fellow working on the major research project on medicinal plants at the AMU Department of Agricultural Microbiology. His current work includes biological activities of Indian medicinal plants against MDR bacteria, antioxidants, and the antimutagenicity potential of bioactive plant extracts.

Mohammad Owais currently holds a faculty position at the Interdisciplinary Biotechnology Unit at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He trained at CDRI, Lucknow and IMTECH, Chandigarh, and worked during his post doctoral training with Dr. R. C. Gallo’s group at the NIH, USA. His present work is focusing on the screening of various herbal drugs for their potential to treat drug resistant infections, and developing and applying drug delivery systems to herbal drugs to assess the efficacy, stability and toxicity in animal models.