Elsevier Phytochemicals as Lead Compounds for New Drug Discovery: Prospects for Sustainable Agriculture

Phytochemicals as Lead Compounds for New Drug Discovery presents complete coverage of the recent advances in the discovery of phytochemicals from medicinal plants as models to the development of new drugs and chemical entities. Functional bioactive compounds of plant origin have been an invaluable source for many human therapeutic drugs and have played a major role in the treatment of diseases around the world. These compounds possess enormous structural and chemical diversity and have led to many important discoveries. This book presents fundament concepts and factors affecting the choice for plant-based products, as well as recent advances in computer-aided drug discovery and FDA drug candidacy acceptance criteria. It also details the various bioactive lead compounds and molecular targets for a range of life-threatening diseases including cancer, diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases. Written by a global team of experts, Phytochemicals as Lead Compounds for New Drug Discovery is an ideal resource for drug developers, phytochemists, plant biochemists, food and medicinal chemists, nutritionists and toxicologists, chemical ecologists, taxonomists, analytical chemists, and other researchers in those fields. It will also be very valuable to professors, students, and researchers in this domain. Review Covers recent advances in the discovery of phytochemicals from medicinal plants as models for the development of new drugs About the Author Chukwuebuka Egbuna is a chartered chemist, a chemical analyst, and an academic researcher. He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Chemists of Nigeria (ICCON), the Nigerian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (NSBMB), the Society of Quality Assurance (SQA) (USA), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) (United Kingdom). Egbuna is also an editor of new Elsevier series on Drug Discovery Update. The series includes books, monographs and edited collections from all areas of drug discovery, including emerging therapeutic claims for the treatment of diseases. He has been engaged in a number of roles at New Divine Favor Pharmaceutical Industry Limited, Akuzor Nkpor, Anambra State, Nigeria, and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University (COOU) in Nigeria. He has collaboratively worked and published quite a number of research articles in the area of phytochemistry, nutrition and toxicology and related areas. He is a reviewer and editorial board member of various journals, including serving as a website administrator for the Tropical Journal of Applied Natural Sciences (TJANS), a journal of the faculty of Natural Sciences, COOU and as an advisory board member under toxicology for the book publisher, Cambridge Scholar Publishing. His primary research interests are in phytochemistry, nutrition and toxicology, food and medicinal chemistry, and analytical biochemistry. Shashank Kumar, PhD, obtained his BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees in biochemistry from the University of Allahabad. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biochemistry in King George’s Medical University. Dr. Kumar has about 60 published scientific papers, reviews, editorial articles, and book chapters in various national and international peer-reviewed journals and has been cited more than 1,200 times. His expertise is in the areas of free radical biology, cancer biology, characterization of plant products, xenobiotic metabolism, and microbiology. He is familiar with many biochemical techniques such as spectrophotometry, ELISA, electrophoresis, PCR, RT-PCR, flow cytometry, TLC, HPLC, LC-MS, cell culture, and microbiological techniques. He has presented his research findings at more than 25 national and international conferences and has attended about 30 workshops at many major universities and medical colleges throughout the India. Dr. Kumar is a life-time member of the Italo-Latin American Society of Ethnomedicine and the Indian Sciences Congress Association, and