الفهرس 
General introductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Drug discovery and development has a long history and dates back to the early days of human civilization. In those ancient times, drugs were not just used as physical remedies but were also associated with religious and spiritual healing.
The early drugs or folk medicines were derived mainly from plant products and supplemented by animal materials and minerals. These drugs were most probably discovered through a combination of trial and error experimentation and observation of human and animal reactions as a result of ingesting such products.
After World War I, the modern pharmaceutical industry came into being, and drug discovery and development following scientific principles was firmly established.
Although pharmaceutical drugs are now widely used worldwide, many ethnic cultures have retained their own folk medicines. In certain instances, these folk medicines exist side by side and are complemented by pharmaceutical drugs (Ng, 2008).
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Nature has constantly supplied mankind with a broad and structurally diverse array of pharmacologically active compounds that continue to be utilized as highly effective drugs to combat a multitude of deadly diseases or as lead structures for the development of novel synthetically derived drugs that mirror their models from nature (Proksch et al., 2002).
Natural products play an important role in cancer therapy today with substantial numbers of anticancer agents used in the clinic being either natural or derived from natural products from various sources such as plants, animals and microorganisms. Large-scale anticancer drug discovery and screening programs such as those promoted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have played an important role in the development of anticancer natural compounds (Stefania et al., 2009).
Thymelaeaceae is a family of 90 genera and 500 species; mostly temperate and tropical shrubs. Genera include Gindia (100 spp), Daphne (70 spp), Pimelea (80 spp) and Thymelaea (30 spp). Some species of Daphne are poisonous and contain vesicant
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resins. Mucilage and coumarins are common in the family but alkaloids are absent (Evans, 2009).
Thymelaea is a genus comprising about 30 species of evergreen shrubs under the flowering plant family Thymelaeaceae, which is native to the Canary Island, the Mediterranean region, North of central Europe and East of central Asia (Kadri et al., 2011).