A Professor of Pharmaceutical Microbiology and Biotechnology at the University of Ibadan, Professor Temitope Olufunmilayo Lawal has called for a return to nature to source medicinal plants and develop bioactive constituents of such into useful therapies.

She made this call while delivering the 604th Inaugural Lecture of the University of Ibadan on behalf of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The title of the lecture was: "Man, Microbes and Medicinal Plants".

Professor Lawal said that man's continuous battle against his adversary - pathogenic microbes, with which he co-exists in nature - would only be won when we return to nature to source medicinal plants.

She asserted that nature holds an enormous number of medically important phytoconstituents that if properly harnessed and developed, could lead to tremendous improvement in healthcare.

The lecturer stated that since humans and microbes coexist, infectious diseases are inevitable, adding that many pathogenic organisms have developed resistance to conventional antibiotics and antimicrobial agents.

This discovery, according to the don, has sparked renewed interest in the use of medicinal plants for healthcare and has led to a resurgence of research into natural products, including medicinal plants, for the discovery and development of alternative agents not only in developing nations but also in developed countries.

Professor Lawal said medicinal plants contain a wide variety of secondary metabolites which include tannins, saponins, alkaloids, cardiac glycosides, phlobatannins, terpenoids, phenols, flavonoids, anthraquinones which are rich sources of bioactive compounds with therapeutic benefits.

She stated that Nigeria is endowed with a rich tradition of folklore medicines in which herbal preparations comprising different medicinal plants or different plant parts are used as an alternative therapy or as complementary to orthodox medicines to prevent and treat many diseases.

Professor Lawal stated that Nigeria is said to be home to about 10,000 plant species used for diverse medicinal purposes among different ethnic groups and of these numbers of plant species, about 1,000 are categorised as medicinal plants, though the medicinal properties of many of them remain undocumented and uninvestigated.

The Don noted that infectious diseases have remained a global threat to health and safety due to emerging and re-emerging cases of microbial infections as they remain the second leading cause of death worldwide.

She, therefore, advocated the creation of pharmacovigilance for herbal medicines with the integration of herb-specific adverse event reporting into the national pharmacovigilance system, the requirement of labels to list known side effects and herb-drug interactions as well as the auditing of post-market safety.

The Inaugural Lecturer called on the federal, state, and local governments to build evidence based, data and research infrastructure by intentionally and consistently funding research activities for the discovery, toxicology, and clinical trials on priority plants for infectious and chronic diseases; and providing all the equipment required to conduct such research activities.

The Don also called for the enforcement of quality, safety and manufacturing standards and ensuring mandatory good agricultural and collection practice and good manufacturing practices for herbal products, issuance of licence to manufacturers and putting in place measures to compel batch traceability.

She advised that wild harvesting should be regulated to prevent the extinction of medically important plant species while promoting the cultivation of and establishment of community nurseries for high demand species.

Professor Lawal also advocated support for local industry and laboratories through the creation of grants/tax incentives for small and medium enterprises to meet good manufacturing practices, establishment of accredited reference laboratories for phytochemical profiling and microbiology as well as the development of export standards and conformity assessment to grow legal markets.

She said addressing antimicrobial resistance explicitly can be achieved by prioritising research on anti-infective plants, standardising regimens to avoid sub-therapeutic dosing and embedding herbal use within national antimicrobial resistance stewardship.

She also called for public enlightenment campaigns on proper use, dosing, and when to seek urgent care, and for government to ban misleading therapeutic claims.

The Inaugural Lecture was the first in the series for the 2025/2026 academic session.