New strategy in the discovery of Natural Antituberculosis Agents from French Guiana flora – SONATA

Nowadays, approximately 60% of the world’s population uses herbal medicines, and plants are recognized as a source of therapeutically effective drugs. Natural products are an important source of new structural scaffolds and historically have always been a privileged source of inspiration in drug discovery. The choice of tuberculosis in this project is not due to chance. Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the top 10 world’s leading causes of death despite 100 years of vaccination and 60 years of antibiotherapy. The region the most affected of France is French Guiana with 3-times more notification rate compared to the whole country. As French Guiana is also one of the world’s biodiversity spots, the local people in French Guiana have long used plants to treat the TB symptoms.
In this context, combination of the traditional ethnopharmacology with new metabolomics and bio/chemoinformatics approaches will be used to foster the detection of bioactive compounds and select the appropriate samples from which further isolation/purification will be performed.
The ethnopharmacological approach represents the first filtering step, allowing to focus only on the plants with already reported anti Mycobacterium tuberculosis activity and/or used in traditional medicine in the treatment of TB symptoms. Because of the diversity of botanical families of plants, different chemical profiles are expected, therefore compounds from different chemical classes. Bio/cheminformatics approaches by represents the second and the third filtering steps, allowing to decrease the number of compounds to purify and avoid unnecessary and time-wasting purification. All the steps will be assisted by the anti M. tuberculosis activity evaluation of extracts, fractions as well as isolated compounds.
This project has 4 aims:
1 : Metabolomic profiling of plants
2: In silico modeling and bio/chemoinformatics
3: Purification and identification of compounds
4: Evaluation of anti M. tuberculosis activity