This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Plants Improving Medicine

Plant-based medicines have been used by humans for thousands of years and are crucial to help fight diseases and critical health issues.

Plant-based medicines have been used by humans for thousands of years and are crucial to help fight diseases and critical health issues such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and high blood pressure. Plant research continues to discover new treatments and vaccines for humans and animals.

Using modern technology, plants are studied to learn how they create chemicals that in-turn, make frequently used medicines. Once the “how” is understood, the genes that are involved in the production of those chemicals are examined and used to either improve the plants as sources of medicine or used as synthetic biology platforms—moved into other systems to produce the medicines.

Hyper sequencing and bioinformatics are used to understand more quickly how plants make these chemicals. As technology continues to advance, these methods become less expensive which makes it possible to investigate much deeper into these larger, non-model systems and to analyze them relatively quickly for less money.

Find out what's happening in Creve Coeurwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Although there is much interest in medicinal plant science, there are many challenges involved in bringing plants from the laboratory to successful commercial cultivation which is why only about 10% of plants have been studied. On average, it takes between 11 – 14 years to bring a drug from the lab bench through the FDA approval to the market. One of the largest setbacks in continued research is a lack of funding in this research area, even though the World Health Organization estimates that approximately 75-80% of the world’s population uses plant medicines either in part or entirely.

Despite the fact that a large number of plant species remain a mystery, drug discovery from plants remains critical in the search for new medicines and improvement in traditional medicines.

Find out what's happening in Creve Coeurwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Learn more how the Danforth Center utilizes plant research for medicinal purposes here.

To view the original article, click here.
To view the Plants Improving Medicine infographic, click here.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Creve Coeur