Antimalarial agents from medicinal plant and fungal sources

Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease caused by Plasmodium spp. It has severely impacted on individual and community productivity, social behavior, urbanization, as well as cultural, political, and economic developments in countries, where it is endemic. Given the high efficacy of major antimalarial drugs in targeting different stages of the parasite life cycle and the access to prophylactic measures, malaria was near to be eradicated. However, the emergence of resistance by parasites towards both curative and preventive drugs, and by mosquitoes to insecticides and traps has reopened the challenge. Natural products are still considered by the global medical researchers as a rich source of new chemical entities for the development of safe, cheap, and sustainable therapeutic agents. Natural products have been the mainstay of antimalarial therapy for thousands of years, and some are used in the traditional medicine by local populations, where malaria is endemic. This chapter updates the recent discoveries in phytochemical remedies that are able to treat malaria at different stages (prevention, recurrence, and therapy) as a result of limitations of synthetic drugs. These active compounds are organized according to their plants and fungi families. This in-depth survey attempts to analyze not only plant extracts, but also their main component’s bioactivity, the mechanism of action, and the potential synergism with other known drugs and side effects. Medicinal chemists can take advantage of such scaffolds to derive semisynthetic compounds with improved pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties. It is important that the efficacy and safety of traditional medicines must be validated, and their active constituents should be identified to establish reliable structure activity relationships.