Natural Products as Potential Sources of Antidiabetic Drugs

Natural products have played and continue to play an invaluable role in the treatment of various diseases and in drug discovery processes. It has remained a source of new compounds with diversified structural arrangements possessing interesting biological activities for various disease treatments. Drugs from natural products are usually considered to be safer, cheaper, easily available and sometimes more efficacious than purely synthetic ones. In recent years, scientists have been in search for safer and more potent drugs from natural sources particularly from medicinal plants. Diabetes is one of the chronic disorders which are associated with high mortality risk. The existing drugs have been identified with one or more adverse effects. In the present review, literature was surveyed to highlight the merits of natural products with regard to their role in diabetic management. Notwithstanding the seemingly decline in the natural product approach to drug discovery in favor of modern approaches such as combinatorial chemistry, literature survey has shown that a lot of research effort is still being directed to natural product in search for new antidiabetic agents. Several antidiabetic phytoconstituents have been isolated from medicinal plants and these were of chemically diversified nature which includes flavonoids, glycosides, terpens, polysaccharides and polypeptides. Based on the merits of nature based medicines, the authors advocate the use of standardized crude forms of some of the natural drugs. Further researches geared towards exploiting the vast array of natural products in our environment and development of the isolated compounds to clinically useful drugs for diabetes management is advocated.