There is a long and sustained history of use of secondary metabolite constituents of terrestrial and marine organisms as sources of small-molecule therapeutic agents [1–6]. Even as the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century nears, new examples of natural products and their derivatives are still being introduced into Western medicine as therapeutic agents. The screening of chemically complex natural product extracts for the discovery of new drugs in a timely manner presents a number of logistical challenges, but various modern technological approaches may be applied to enhance this process [6–9]. It is considered that when innovative methods of discovery are applied, natural products will continue to offer a vast resource to yield structurally novel compounds with promising biological activities [6–10]. Medicinal plants have a long history of use by humans, and originally were employed as crude drugs in forms such as teas, tinctures, poultices, and powders [11, 12]. Beginning with the purification of morphine from the opium poppy at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a number of important plant-derived drugs have been obtained in pure form in the intervening period, including artemisinin, atropine, colchicine, cocaine, digoxin, galanthamine, quinine, paclitaxel, and vinblastine [11– 16]. There are a large number of secondary metabolites known already from plants, with about 170,000 unique compounds of this type having been characterized [9], of which the largest groups are isoprenoids, phenolics, and terpenoids [14]. Given that a high proportion of the estimated 270,000 species of plants in existence has not yet been subjected to any phytochemical or biological activity investigation, there is a good chance that additional new lead compounds for use in drug discovery programs will continue to be elucidated for the foreseeable future. Cancer remains a major public health problem in countries all over the world, in developed and developing countries alike. According to recent figures on global

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