1st Edition
Medicinal Plants in the Asia Pacific for Zoonotic Pandemics, Volume 1 Family Amborellaceae to Vitaceae
Preface
Foreword by Dr Vladimir Zarubaev
1. The Clade Protomagnoliids
2. The Clade Magnoliids
3. The Medicithe Clade Monocots
4. The Clade Ranunculids
5. The Clade Core Eudicots
6. The Clade Rosids
Biography
Christophe Wiart, PharmD, PhD, is an associate professor of the School of Pharmacy of the University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus. His fields of expertise are Asian ethnopharmacology, chemotaxonomy, and ethnobotany. He has collected, identified, and classified several hundred species of medicinal plants from India, Southeast Asia, and China.
Dr. Wiart appeared on HBO’s Vice (TV series) in season 3, episode 6 (episode 28 of the series), titled "The Post-Antibiotic World and Indonesia’s Palm Bomb," April 17, 2015. It highlighted the need to find new treatments for infections that were previously treatable with antibiotics but are now resistant to multiple drugs. "The last hope for the human race’s survival, I believe, is in the rainforests of tropical Asia," said ethnopharmacologist Christophe Wiart. "The pharmaceutical wealth of this land is immense."
He currently supervises several PhD students working on the discovery of novel antibacterial, anticancer, antiinflammatory, and antioxidant agents from medicinal plants. Dr. Wiart has written several reference books on the medicinal plants of Asia.
Prof. Christophe Wiart, the author of the presented book, and scientist I am lucky to work with, is one of the most prominent world authorities in the field of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology. He has collected, described and characterized several hundreds of rare plants of Asian rainforests whose extracts contain novel antibiotics, antiviral, anti-parasite, antioxidant or anticancer agents. It’s hardly to overestimate the importance of Prof. Wiart’s efforts in the field of search and development of novel pharmaceutical agents against human diseases, in particular infectious ones caused by drug-resistant pathogens. It was he who said that “…the last hope for the human race’s survival … is in the rainforests of tropical Asia. The pharmaceutical wealth of this land is immense.”
In summary, the problem of development of novel antivirals is of greatest priority in medicinal science, and in this regard the book of Prof. Christophe Wiart is very desirable, timely and recommended for reading by specialists in botany, plant biochemistry, virology and medicinal chemistry.
- Dr. Vladimir Zarubaev, from the Foreword
