PURPOSE To investigate the ability of a commercial extract from the medicinal plant Artemisia annua to modulate production of the cytokine, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), and the cyclooxygenase (COX) inflammatory marker, prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) in activated neutrophils. METHODS Neutrophils were harvested from rat whole blood and cultured in the presence of plant extract or control sampl...

Plants have been used as a traditional medicine for the treatment of malaria. Plants may provide drugs directly such as quinine from cinchona bark or they may provide template molecules on which to base further new structures by organic synthesis—artemisinin from Artemisia annua. At the NIMR, efforts are being made to do primary screening of crude extracts of plant products to screen different ...

The present paper is a continuation of our study on the Chinese traditional herb Arternisia annua L. [1— 5], describing several additional constituents: quinghaosu IV and V (V, VII), quinghao acid (VIII) [6], chrysosplenol (VIa) [7] and a paraffinic alcohol; V, VII and VIII are compounds with unreported structures.

Malaria is a real and constant danger to nearly half of the world's population of 7.4 billion people. In 2015, 212 million cases were reported along with 429,000 estimated deaths. The World Health Organization recommends artemisinin-based combinatorial therapies, and the artemisinin for this purpose is mainly isolated from the plant Artemisia annua. However, the plant supply of artemisinin is i...