The success of many biopharmaceuticals relies on the development of stable formulations and/or delivery systems. Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry serves to facilitate the continued development of these systems to fulfil their commercial potential. With an international research concerning the expression, purification, characterization and application of biological macromolecules in therapeutics and diagnostics.

Drug discovery is a challenging field. It involves team work of several experts including medicinal chemists, natural chemists, pharmacologists, toxicologists, clinicians etc to generate a safe and biologically active drug. In the drug discovery programme, medicinal plants play a key role and are a source of novel molecules. The knowledge of folk medicine and ethnopharmacological studies of plants play a significant role in the development of primary screening methods in drug discovery.Enzymes are the targets for many drugs because of the simplicity of enzyme based assays. It involves the interaction with substrate to form the product. The inhibitor will also interact with the enzyme, hence decreasing the rate of reaction. The enzyme inhibition assays have prompted us to do a primary screening of the methanolic extracts of plants commonly used in Pakistan. Therefore these studies were designed to investigate if any a target drug is present in a plant and to which extent it is there to inhibit a particular enzyme of therapeutic importance.

In search for new enzyme inhibitors of therapeutic importance, the present study was designed to find inhibitors of two enzymes of therapeutic significance, i.e., Lipoxygenase (EC 1.13.11.12) and NTPDase (Nucleoside triphosphate diphosphohydrolases) (EC 3.6.1.5) enzymes from extracts of medicinal plants used in folk medicine. Lipoxygenase inhibitors are involved in many inflammatory diseases, asthma, cancer, increase immune response to viral and bacterial infection, leukemia, lymphoma and autoimmune disorders. NTPDase inhibitors are currently target for various cardiovascular diseases and some types of cancer.