Projet de recherche BL/V/22 (Action de recherche BL)
1/1/2010-1/3/2012
Context and objectives
Natural products are widely used in traditional medicine, and are nowadays also gaining interest in Western countries. Medicinal plants have a potential to be developed as high-value healthcare products. However, quality control is an important issue during development of such products to ensure the identity, safety and quality of the natural and synthetized products. In this project natural compounds of vegetable origin with interesting biological activities will be examined, in order to be utilised as new drugs or in the parapharmaceutic field, e.g. as non-nutritive and alternative sweeteners, nutraceuticals or ecological insecticides. Only a limited number of natural products will be focused on and considered as case studies. The main objectives of this project :
1) To find natural compounds or extracts from Euphorbiaceae plants used in Vietnam as herbal medicine with interesting biological activities to contribute as new material for the pharmaceutical or food industries, e.g. as food material, functional food, nutraceuticals,
2) To survey medicinal plants from the Euphorbiaceae family used in traditional medicine in Vietnam. The study will focus mainly on Phyllanthus, but also on Mallotus species, with a special interest in endemic species.
3) To study the chemical composition and investigate biological activities of selected medicinal plants using chemical and molecular biological techniques.
4) To produce materials (food supplements) and/or to identify lead molecules with a potential interest for pharmaceutical or food industries.
5) To apply analytical aspects for quality control of plant materials or products from plants: chromatography fingerprints of crude extracts for identification and quality control purposes, and quantitative determination of specific active compounds.
