Fighting Multidrug Resistance with Herbal Extracts, Essential Oils and Their Components

In the search for successful antitubercular treatments, investigators have often turned their efforts to ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, and phytochemistry. Since many of the world’s peoples have well-developed systems of traditional medicine with plants and their extracts as a major component and many of these plants have been used to treat tuberculosis, indigenous herbal medicine is a logical starting point for a research program. The major aims in this chapter are to summarize current antitubercular treatments; look for structural patterns in molecules that have been used successfully in the therapeutics of tuberculosis; examine published evidence of natural products derived principally from macrophytic species with an anecdotal reputation as antitubercular treatments or that have been deliberately tested for antitubercular activity; and identify promising structural classes of plant metabolites that can serve as lead compounds. Finally, I would like to indicate some of the directions being followed by leading researchers in the field and suggest ways forward in drug discovery to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.