Natural Product Derivatives as Promising Source for the Discovery of New Drugs for Threats to Global Health

Dear colleagues,

The World Health Organization has emphasized a few global threats to health.

In 2019, air pollution is considered by WHO as the greatest environmental risk to health. Pollutants can penetrate respiratory and circulatory systems, resulting in increasing numbers of cases of diseases like cancer, stroke, and heart and lung disease, especially occurring in low- and middle-income countries. It has been predicted that from 2020–2050 climate change will cause 250,000 additional deaths yearly, from malaria, malnutrition, and diarrhea.

Non-communicable diseases are responsible for 70% of deaths worldwide, incl. diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. That is 41 million people.

Antibiotic resistance threatens to take us back to a time when we were unable to easily cure infections such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and salmonellosis. The inability to prevent infection can seriously jeopardize surgery and procedures such as chemotherapy.

WHO identifies diseases and pathogens that have the potential to cause a public health emergency. Recently, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a global pandemic caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). To date, there have been more than 21 million reported cases of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

There are increasing numbers of publications reporting the effect of natural products and traditional medicine approaches in therapy and prevention of the aforementioned global health threads.

The use of natural products and their derivatives is being reported in an increasing number of publications because of the safety profile of these promising sources – natural agents.

Therefore, this Special Issue of Chemistry is dedicated to original research and review articles that cover the latest findings on the use of natural products and their derivatives, as well as new extraction techniques for the recovery of bioactive constituents from plants, fruits, or vegetables (not limited to), in the discovery of new potential drugs for global health threats. Research concerning new cocktail protocols to relieve severe disease cases is also welcome.

Dr. Agata Kabała-Dzik
Guest Editor

Dr. Robert Wojtyczka
Dr. Anna Kleczka
co-Guest Editors

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