Evaluation of the anticancer potential of plants used as traditional medicines by Aboriginal people

Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT).The goal of this project was to use traditional Aboriginal knowledge of plant medicines as a guide to identifying compounds that may be of use in the treatment of cancer. The first section of this introductory chapter is a brief review of the literature, focusing on what we know about cancers in general and providing some illustration of what drugs have been developed to combat this notorious disease. An overview of the various approaches to drug discovery follows. Advantages of the ethnopharmacological strategy to biodiscovery are then discussed, setting the scene for the rationale of this PhD project. Finally, the scope of this thesis is addressed, in which the specific aims and main outcomes of the study are summarised. - IntroductionGeneral introduction -- Materials and methods -- Optimisation of experimental techniques -- Preliminary screening of plant extracts -- Evaluation of most promising plant extracts -- Further evaluation of plant extract EA3 -- Two different biodiscovery strategies -- General discussion -- Bibliography -- Appendices A-PThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Australia, 201