ABSTRACT
Malaria remains a major threat to public health with 40% of the world’s population currently at risk, 300 to 500 million cases of clinical malaria, and 1 to 2 million deaths each year. The dramatic extension of plasmodial resistance to most antimalarial drugs is directly responsible for the widespread persistence of this high level of malaria endemicity and related morbidity in tropical areas (World Health Organization, 2001). Such a situation, together with the difficulty in developing vaccines (Silvie et al., 2002), highlights the urgent need for novel antimalarial drugs (Ridley, 2002). In this regard, natural products of vegetal origin remain a poorly exploited source of potentially active molecules, even though the two most effective drugs for malaria originate from plants: quinine from the bark of the Peruvian cinchona tree and artemisinin from the Chinese antipyretic Artemisia annua. It is likely that other plants contain as yet undiscovered antimalarial substances.
