Plant-derived antiviral drugs as novel hepatitis B virus inhibitors: Cell culture and molecular docking study

Parvez, Mohammad K.; Tabish Rehman, Md.; Alam, Perwez; Al-Dosari, Mohammed S.; Alqasoumi, Saleh I.; Alajmi, Mohammed F.

Traditional herbal products and drugs of indigenous origin have an ancient history of curing several chronic and infective diseases. A range of various plant metabolites are shown to impede virus replication without affecting the host physiology or with limited side-effects (Martin and Ernst, 2003; Hussain et al., 2017) . In addition to their ability to interfere directly with viral replication, these natural products may also modulate the host immune response against infection (Kurokawa et al., 2010) . In line with this, several natural or plant-derived compounds belonging to different chemical classes have been reported to have potential anti-HBV activities (Chen et al., 1995; Chang et al., 2005; Wang, 2000; Huang et al., 2008; Chou et al., 2012; Qiu and Chen, 2013; Wu, 2016; Parvez et al., 2016) . Compared to interferons or lamivudine treatment, some plant products are reported with similar or even better efficacy (Chen and Zhu, 2013; Arbab et al., 2017; Zhang et al, 2017) . Interestingly therefore, approximately 80% of the CHB patients in China rely on traditional herbal medicines.