Journal of Medicinal Natural Products: A New Journal with a New Perspective

Editorial

Journal of Medicinal Natural Products: A New Journal with a New Perspective

Lutfun Nahar ^1,2

1 Centre for Natural Products Discovery, Liverpool John Moores University, Byrom Street, Liverpool L3 3AF, UK

2 Laboratory of Growth Regulators, Palacký University and Institute of Experimental Botany, The Czech Academy of Sciences, Šlechtitelů 27, 78371 Olomouc, Czech Republic

Correspondence: L.Nahar@ljmu.ac.uk or nahar@ueb.cas.cz

Journal of Medicinal Natural Products has been launched to address various aspects of innovative research exclusively focusing on medicinal natural products. Natural products are secondary metabolites biosynthesized by various living organisms, e.g., plants and microbes. However, not all natural products have known medicinal values. Therefore, medicinal natural products refer to only those natural products that have known or clinically proven medicinal values [1]. Over the years, natural products have played a key role in the discovery of modern drugs like aspirin, cephalosporins, penicillins, quinine, taxol, vinblastine, vincristine and many more; the major contributions have been in three major disease areas: cancer, microbial infections, and malaria. The other disease areas, where the contributions from medicinal natural products are well documented include cardiovascular and neurological disorders, liver and kidney diseases, diabetes, psychosis, and obesity. Cancer chemoprevention is another emerging area, where medicinal natural products have started to play a significant role.

The practice of using crude forms of natural materials in the treatment of human ailments goes back to thousands of years and has formed several well-known traditional medicinal systems across the globe, e.g., Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) [1,2]. The discovery of the antimalarial drug artemisinin and the award of the Noble prize in Physiology/Medicine to Youyou Tu in 2015, have brought natural products back to limelight. There is no doubt that natural products, because of their unique chemical diversity, will continue to contribute to new drug discovery in the coming years.

With the remarkable advancement in separation science (particularly, various hyphenated techniques [3]), structural characterization methods and assay technologies, natural products drug discovery process has become highly competitive with the conventional drug discovery processes. Introduction of and rapid developments in AI and computational methods have significantly enhanced the capabilities of natural products drug discovery research, Nowadays, a combination of in silico, in vitro and in vivo evaluation (including pre-clinical and clinical trials) has become a norm in any high-yielding and high-quality research with medicinal natural products [4].

While the aims and scope of this new journal have been well articulated in the instructions/guidelines for authors on the journal website, it can be mentioned that this journal will fundamentally capture all new developments and emerging technologies in research involving medicinal natural products. We understand that there may be several journals in natural products, but this new journal will stand out from the crowd based on its uniqueness, quality, standard and absolute focus on the medicinal aspects of natural products.

This new journal is in the process of forming a strong and active editorial board comprising members from all over the world, chosen based on their outstanding contributions in medicinal natural products research. The journal team believes that this journal will serve as a sought-after knowledgebase for a large scientific community comprising researchers from all levels and varied experiences, who have been involved in medicinal natural products research or have a keen interest in medicinal natural products and will soon become one of the leading journals in this research area. It will also cater for the readers, who are generally interested in drugs from natural origins.