Pharmacognosy implies multidisciplinary studies to identify new drug candidates (pure compounds or extracts) or new leads from natural origin and control their quality.
Our laboratory, created in 1996, chose to focus on plants used in traditional medicine to:
- Evaluate the activities of crude extracts from traditional medicinal plants and obtain data to support their traditional uses, their indications and analyze potential toxicities.
- Control their quality to limit adulterations and standardize treatments.
- Isolate and identify bioactive compounds which could constitute new prototypes for drug development
- Analyze the possible targets and identify structure-activity relationships
To allow these researches, we developed an expertise in purification, structure determination of compounds from complex matrices and development of quantification validated methods, while most of the pharmacological experiments are realized in collaboration with teams having expertise in the selected biological activities, except antileishmanial, antitrypanosomal and cytotoxic activities which are realized within the team. In vivo activities and toxicities may also been determined.