From the Bush to the Brain: Preclinical Stages of Ethnobotanical Anti-Inflammatory and Neuroprotective Drug Discovery—An Australian Example

Abstract

The Australian rainforest is a rich source of medicinal plants that have evolved in the face of dramatic environmental challenges over a million years due to its prolonged geographical isolation from other continents. The rainforest consists of an inherent richness of plant secondary metabolites that are the most intense in the rainforest. The search for more potent and more bioavailable compounds from other plant sources is ongoing, and our short review will outline the pathways from the discovery of bioactive plants to the structural identification of active compounds, testing for potency, and then neuroprotection in a triculture system, and finally, the validation in an appropriate neuro-inflammatory mouse model, using some examples from our current research. We will focus on neuroinflammation as a potential treatment target for neurodegenerative diseases including multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson’s (PD), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) for these plant-derived, anti-inflammatory molecules and highlight cytokine suppressive anti-inflammatory drugs (CSAIDs) as a better alternative to conventional nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to treat neuroinflammatory disorders.