Investigating South African plants as a source of new antimalarial drugs

Abstract

Based on the historical success of natural products as antimalarial drugs and the urgent need for new antimalarials, a number of South African medicinal plants have been evaluated for their antimalarial properties. This paper reviews the major studies conducted and their findings. Overall three ethnobotanical screening programmes have been conducted on South African plants and there have been three studies adopting a more direct approach where plants within a particular genus were screened for antiplasmodial activity. The paper also summarizes antimalarial plants, which were studied individually, as well as the bioactive molecules identified from selected active plant extracts