The Dream Team
The Drug Discovery Research Team (DREAM) is a research group from the Pharmacology & Toxicology (P&T) Unit , Department of Biomedical Sciences (DBS), Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS), University Putra Malaysia (UPM), Serdang. The idea to set up a research group consisting of researchers from the P&T Unit came from Associate Professor Dr. Zainul Amiruddin Zakaria and in 1st December, 2011 DREAM was established. The aimed of DREAM was to gather interested senior and junior researchers, particularly from the P&T Unit, under one roof so that they can work together in a research environment wherein the senior can guide the junior and the junior can gave their opinion towards the improvement of researches carried out without hesitation. It is hoped that through this collaboration among the staffs involved, whereby their expertise and knowledge are shared together, the P&T Unit will become one of the major research unit/center in FMHS that will contribute towards creating various world-class researches. On the other hand, the researches conducted by DREAM is also hope to help promotes UPM, in general, and FMHS, in particular, to the research societies throughout the world and give opportunity to the staffs involved towards collaboration with outside and well-known researchers.
Introduction
Nature has been a source of medicinal agents for thousands of years and an impressive number of modern drugs have been isolated from natural sources, many based on their use in traditional medicine. In fact, plants produce a diverse range of bioactive molecules, making them a rich source of different types of medicines.
Over 50% of all modern clinical drugs are of natural product origin and natural products play an important role in drug development programs in the pharmaceutical industry. There has been a revival of interest in herbal medicines, which is due to the increase awareness of the limited ability of synthetic pharmaceutical products to control major diseases and the need to discover new molecular structures as lead compounds from the plant kingdom.
This burgeoning worldwide interest in medicinal plants reflects recognition of the validity of many traditional claims regarding the value of natural products in health care. The relatively lower incidence of adverse reactions to plant preparations compared to modern conventional pharmaceuticals, coupled with their reduced cost, is encouraging both the consuming public and national health care institutions to consider plant medicines as alternatives to synthetic drugs. The potential of plant extracts as anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer, antiulcer, hepatoprotective, antimicrobial etc. agents have been studied by a very large number of researchers in different parts of the world and the interest in a large number of traditional natural products has been increasing lately. Thus, there is a need to continue the search for lead compounds from the natural sources for future drugs development with hope of finding drug candidates with less, or possibly no, side effects.
Background History
The Drug Discovery Research Team (DREAM) is a research group from the Pharmacology & Toxicology (P&T) Unit , Department of Biomedical Sciences (DBS), Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS), University Putra Malaysia (UPM), Serdang. The idea to set up a research group consisting of researchers from the P&T Unit came from Associate Professor Dr. Zainul Amiruddin Zakaria and in 1st December, 2011 DREAM was established. The aimed of DREAM was to gather interested senior and junior researchers, particularly from the P&T Unit, under one roof so that they can work together in a research environment wherein the senior can guide the junior and the junior can gave their opinion towards the improvement of researches carried out without hesitation. It is hoped that through this collaboration among the staffs involved, whereby their expertise and knowledge are shared together, the P&T Unit will become one of the major research unit/center in FMHS that will contribute towards creating various world-class researches. On the other hand, the researches conducted by DREAM is also hope to help promotes UPM, in general, and FMHS, in particular, to the research societies throughout the world and give opportunity to the staffs involved towards collaboration with outside and well-known researchers.
With pharmacology and toxicology being its core field of research, most of the researches carried out by DREAM revolved around natural products drug discovery mainly from plants that are native to Malaysia or its neighbouring countries. The plants selected for pharmacological and toxicological profilings are either based on Malay or other tribes traditional uses. However, this rule is not necessarily followed as we believed that all the plants created by ALLAH SWT served their own purposes and might possess certain hidden medicinal properties. These hidden medicinal potentials need to be further explored regardless of their traditional claims in order to contribute to the new drug discovery and development.
Since we are nowadays exposed to various types of diseases in which some of them are new diseases, and the fact that the currently available standard drugs effectiveness are overshadowed by their adverse side effects, there are needs to search for new lead candidates from natural products for future drugs development. The relatively lower incidence of adverse effects to plant preparations compared to modern conventional pharmaceuticals, coupled with their reduced cost, is encouraging both the consuming public and national health care institutions to consider plant medicines as alternatives to synthetic drugs.
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