Dear Visitor,

The Department of Pharmacognosy is ascribed to carry out the responsibilities of offering courses pertaining to drugs from natural sources, plants or animals. The contents of these courses are planned to provide the students with the most recent developments in areas dealing with preparation, collection, storage and analysis of medicinal plants and drugs from natural sources.

In this essence some courses offer different approaches in the screening of medicinal plants for potentially active compounds such as anticancer agents or antibiotics and various techniques employed in the isolation of these compounds including chromatographic techniques. In addition, other courses are devoted to teach students topics in drug preparation, assay and biosynthesis. Methods in production of plants with high yield of active constituents and recent methods in structure analysis of natural drugs are also highlighted. The department also participates with a number of professional courses covering food analysis, detection of drugs of abuse, biotechnological production of drugs and evaluation of natural drugs which help the students with more specialized professionally oriented information. In the area of graduate studies, the department offers a Master Degree program in Pharmacognosy which comprises twelve advanced courses in addition to a well developed research program designed to orient graduate students in the application of scientific technology in the discovery and analysis of drugs from natural products. Recently, a Doctor of Philosophy Degree Program in Pharmacognosy was approved to start in the academic year 2001/2002 which comprises eight advanced courses in addition to a high caliber research program in the discovery and analysis of natural products.

 Dr. Adnan J. Al-Rehaily