ABSTRACT
Leishmaniasis is considered as clinical expression triggered by the protozoal parasites of the genus Leishmania. Almost 1 6 million of new individual cases cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) and more than half a million of new individual cases of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) ensue every year all over the world. Above half a century, the medical manifestations of this infection have been cured almost entirely with the pentavalent antimonial combinations. The major disadvantage in the management of leishmaniasis includes its advent of resistance to the existing chemotherapeutics. Leishmanicidal agents need to be directed in low doses as the usually procured drugs show severe adverse effects, and henceforth drug resistance can occur promptly. To date, vaccination methods and approaches have been found to be unsuccessful to arrive for clinical trials, chemotherapy centered small molecular ailments are provisionally the exclusive curing strategy. Plants are the innocuous sources of bioactive compounds, which have been reported to be effective primarily, chemically stable, and least harmful as compared with the synthetic molecules. The natural products, chiefly plant-originated phytoconstituents and their byproducts of varied structural groups and classes, displaying the anti-leishmanial activity (ALA), further could be established for their potential efficacy in drug development systems and biomedical research, have been reported in this review. New studies have been emphasized with some biopharmaceutical nano-technologies for designing varied drug delivery approaches, including nanoparticles (NPs), nanocapsules (NCs), liposomes, micelles, cochleate, and nanotubes. Furthermore, the current resistance of anti-leishmanial available drugs and their lethal effects has fetched the drift to measure the ALA of several plant-derived phytoconstituents extracts and their refined compounds further briefed in this review.
