One of the great challenges of our time is to identify innovative, highly potent active compounds for drug development. Diabetes is expanding worldwide at a worrying pace. Previously neglected tropical diseases and malaria claim many millions of lives every year. The ubiquitous development of resistance to conventional antibiotics and antivirals pushes medicine to the limits of its options for therapies. Drug development is thus highly relevant, but also time consuming and expensive – and above all, it requires innovation. In particular, innovations from the field of natural product chemistry offer us a wide range of opportunities. With nature, and especially plants, having developed complex strategies to form innumerable natural substances in the course of evolution, access to a huge pool of potential active drug lead candidates opens up. International drug approvals in recent years have shown that herbal natural products can be well-suited as a basis for innovative lead compounds to combat many existential diseases. 

These innovations, however, require more support, since this field of research is underfunded by public grants. 

The Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research, which has been active for many decades on a global scale and is networking and representing scientists in this sector, has created an active instrument through the Foundation „Plants for Health“ to identify and support highly motivated groups of researchers, innovative lead compound product ideas, and promising developments at an early stage.

Help to shape high-profile, innovative research based on natural substances and herbal extracts from the 

plant kingdom: - towards new, potent drugs.