Editorial: Nanotechnology for natural products

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Editorial on the Research Topic Nanotechnology for natural productsHumans around the globe have lived through an unprecedented time.The emergence and rapid spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have resulted in the loss of millions of lives, and this number is still climbing every day and hour.As a consequence, there have been drastic changes over the past 2 years in how we live, communicate, and work; most importantly, COVID-19 has raised global awareness of infectious diseases and pandemic responses to an exceptional level.Like COVID-19, highly contagious and lethal viruses, such as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Ebola, and the recent addition to the list, Monkeypox, pose extraordinary challenges to modern civilizations.On the other hand, non-communicable diseases, including heart disease, stroke, and cancer, are still claiming the majority of deaths on a global level (World Health Organization, 2020).Before the availability of synthetic drugs, civilizations worldwide relied on natural products extracted from the environment and various organisms for healthcare.Natural products and their derivatives continue to be critical components in the drug library available today.Indeed, almost a quarter of the new drugs approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 1981 are natural products, botanical mixtures, or their derivatives (Newman and Cragg, 2020).Recent developments in analytical characterization, genome mining, and engineering have further increased interest in drug discovery from the pool of natural products (Atanasov et al., 2021).This Research Topic celebrates a collection of studies at the intersection of natural product research and nanotechnological advances.