review · Frontiers in Immunology
Medicinal plants offer accessible, affordable, and widely accepted alternatives in healthcare, yet ensuring their safety, quality, and efficacy remains a vital challenge globally. At the same time, the rapid rise of multidrug-resistant pathogens poses a severe threat to international health, especially within lower-income regions. This crisis is largely propelled by inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions, overuse, and unregulated distribution. Addressing these resistance challenges requires the formal standardisation of plant-derived pharmaceuticals, alongside the urgent preservation of traditional botanical knowledge before it is lost. Natural and pharmaceutical scientists increasingly view medicinal plants as viable reservoirs for novel antimicrobial agents. Evaluating prevalent bacterial threats and the widespread use of herbal remedies across different regions clarifies how plant-based bioactive compounds deploy unique biological mechanisms to overcome microbial resistance.
The rapid spread of antibiotic-resistant infections undermines modern medical treatments, hitting lower-income regions especially hard. Conventional antibiotics are failing against evolving pathogens, creating an urgent need for new therapies. Exploring and standardising plant-based compounds provides a pathway to discover alternative antimicrobial agents, drawing on affordable, culturally accepted botanical resources to protect global public health.
The work points toward applications in pharmaceutical development, specifically the creation of standardised, plant-derived antimicrobial therapies to tackle resistant pathogens. Primary users would include natural product researchers and pharmaceutical companies seeking drug discovery leads. Because the underlying work is a review synthesising pathogen threats, usage trends, and resistance mechanisms, it remains at the early-stage research phase, well before clinical formulation or market readiness.
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In recent years, medicinal plants have gained significant attention in modern medicine due to their accessibility, affordability, widespread acceptance, and safety, making herbal remedies highly valued globally. Consequently, ensuring medicinal plants' quality, efficacy, and safety has become a critical concern for developed and developing nations. The emergence of multidrug-resistant microorganisms poses a serious global health threat, particularly in low-income regions, despite significant advancements in antimicrobial drugs and medical research over the past century. The rapid spread of these multidrug-resistant infections is primarily attributed to improper prescriptions, overuse, and unregulated access to antibiotics. Addressing these challenges, the standardization of plant-derived pharmaceuticals could pave the way for a transformative era in healthcare. Preserving and leveraging the historical knowledge of medicinal plants is essential before such valuable information is lost. Recently, there has been growing interest among natural and pharmaceutical scientists in exploring medicinal plants as potential sources of antimicrobial agents. This current review aims to identify the most common pathogens threatening human health, analyze the factors contributing to the rise of drug-resistant microorganisms, and evaluate the widespread use of medicinal plants across various countries as alternative antibiotics, highlighting their unique mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance.
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DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1491777
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