New strategy in the discovery of Natural AntiTuberculosis Agents from French Guiana flora

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 have always been a privileged source of inspiration in drug discovery.

In our SONATA project, we focus on tackling tuberculosis (TB), one of the top 10 leading causes of death worldwide. Despite 100 years of vaccination and 60 years of antibiotherapy, TB remains a significant global health challenge. French Guiana, with its high notification rate, is particularly affected. Additionally, French Guiana is a biodiversity hotspot where local communities have long relied on traditional plant-based remedies to treat TB symptoms.

To address this, our project combines traditional ethnopharmacology with cutting-edge metabolomics and bio/chemoinformatics approaches. This integrated approach allows us to identify bioactive compounds from plants and select suitable samples for further isolation and purification.

The ethnopharmacological approach serves as the initial filtering step, focusing on plants already known for their anti-Mycobacterium tuberculosis activity or traditional medicinal use in TB treatment. Given the diverse botanical families of plants, we expect to discover compounds from different chemical classes.

Bio/chemoinformatics approaches represent the subsequent filtering steps, reducing the number of compounds requiring purification and avoiding unnecessary time-wasting processes. Throughout the project, we evaluate the anti-M. tuberculosis activity of extracts, fractions, and isolated compounds to guide our research.