Pharmacognosy:
Pharmacognosy is the interdisciplinary scientific study of natural drugs and bioactive compounds from plants, animals, and minerals—originally focused on identifying crude drugs but now expanded to molecular, chemical, ecological, and medicinal aspects of natural products.
Plants produce a variety of chemical compounds—primary metabolites essential for all plants and secondary metabolites with specialized roles like defense and pollination attraction—that include classes such as alkaloids, polyphenols, glycosides, and terpenes, many of which have therapeutic uses in humans and are isolated through bioassay-guided fractionation. Traditional medicine continue to inform modern pharmacology. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “Sea Cucumbers Could Be the Key to Stopping Cancer Growth With a Rare Sugar Compound,” Jack Knudson, Discover (paywall):
“The cells in our body are essentially covered in ‘forests’ of glycans,” said Vitor Pomin, a professor of pharmacognosy at the University of Mississippi in a statement. “And enzymes change the function of this forest – essentially prunes the leaves of that forest. If we can inhibit that enzyme, theoretically, we are fighting against the spread of cancer.”
