Current Drug Discovery in Bioactive Compounds for the Treatment of Diabetes

Diabetes is a long-term physiological disorder that impacts individuals of all ages and has a profound impact on their daily lives around the globe. There is an urgent need to find and develop new antidiabetic medications due to the rise of resistance and adverse effects associated with the current crop of oral antidiabetic drugs, even though insulin preparations and other synthetic alternatives are readily available.

The following keywords were used to search the online databases: medicinal plants, diabetes, traditional applications and drug therapy. Consequently, this review set out to compile a synopsis of the documented phytochemistry and recent advances of the selected plant species. We used scientific databases including Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and Google Scholar to search for relevant literature. Our goal was to find published information on traditionally used medicinal plants that could help with diabetes control and therapy.

In contrast, medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies around the world are increasingly looking to plants and herbs for bioactive compounds that could lead to the development of new antidiabetic medications that are more effective at controlling diabetes and have fewer side effects than current options. Steroids, alkaloids, phenolic compounds, lignans, carbohydrates, glycosides, and many more plant-derived secondary metabolites have a wide range of useful biological effects for humans, including anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and antidiabetic effects. Antidiabetic plants, their bioactive components, chemical characterisation, and plant-based diets for diabetes control are the main topics of this review. However, very little is known about the exact way the plant-based product works from a scientific standpoint.

This article's focus is on plants that can help lower blood sugar levels and bioactive compounds that are obtained from plants.

It is suggested that isolating phytocompounds from these herbs has the potential to yield newer antidiabetic medicines, and it may help researchers in their pursuit of these agents.