What makes a medicinal plant, well… medicinal?

As we detail in this blog post, there’s a rich shared history of humanity’s collective use of plants as medicine. Moreover, cataloging such practices in the form of a knowledge graph revealed a surprising trend of shared usage of plants that belong to the same genera across cultures. We have had great success to date using our knowledge graph to pair medicinal plants with potential disease indications to rapidly discover first-in-class candidate medicines. More to come on this as we prepare for the launch of our clinical programs.

But, as we built our search engine for new chemistry, we wanted to explore chemical space beyond medicinal plants for their use in discovering new medicines. To this end, we set out to determine whether we could identify what makes medicinal plants special from a chemistry perspective.

For all the details on this work, please check out our recent publication in the Journal of Cheminformatics, but the key conclusion is that by every measure that we investigated (e.g., bioactivity, compound class, molecular properties, etc.), the compounds present in medicinal plants cannot be differentiated from those in non-medicinal plants. This suggests that plants were discovered, utilized, and recorded for their medicinal properties due to factors other than their inherent chemical composition. For example, plants found in close proximity to habitable geographies were perhaps more likely to be discovered as medicinal.?

We find this result incredibly exciting, as it means that our search space for new medicines extends beyond the ~40,000 known medicinal plants to the entire plant kingdom! These results highlight the vast diversity and universal utility of nature’s chemistry to solve many problems facing humanity and our planet. It’s time to explore!