Can ethnopharmacology contribute to the development of new anticancer drugs?

Ethnopharmacologic and ethnomedical information has been poorly utilized in the past in the search for new and effective treatments for cancer. In spite of this, plants have been a very viable source of clinically useful compounds, leads for synthetic modification and tools for mechanistic studies. In this paper, a new strategy for the discovery of anticancer agents from plants is proposed in which ethnomedical information is correlated against pertinent published chemical and biological information, resulting in a prioritization of plants for collection. Authenticated plants are extracted and the extracts tested in a broad array of more than 20 human cancer cell and mechanism-based assays through a cooperative research program involving a university, a research institute and a pharmaceutical company. Bioactivity-directed fractionation will be carried out at all three sites, with a view to identifying novel compounds which will serve as candidates for preclinical testing.