Pharmacognosy Department is a distinctive department in the Faculty of Pharmacy.
Pharmacognosy is considered the oldest discipline of all pharmacy sciences. Plants have been used
as medicine by mankind for thousands of years to treat various ailments. This knowledge about
plants have passed from generation to generation. The ancients Chinese, Egyptians, Indians,
Greeks, Romans used a wide range of plants for medicinal applications. The term
“Pharmacognosy” was first used by the German botanist Seydler. The science of Pharmacognosy
embraces the study of the natural drugs obtained from plants, microbes, animals and other natural
sources.

Since antiquity, natural products have played a crucial role in drug discovery, furthermore, they
are still popular to obtain new drug candidates. Natural products are used as herbal preparations,
or as active ingredients in a diversity of dosage forms; some others are modified by chemical
synthesis to obtain new compounds with different activity and bioavailability. Natural compounds
are considered as valuable leads for drug discovery.

Pharmacognosy Department teaches courses like: Medicinal plants, Pharmacognosy, Chemistry
of natural products, Quality control of herbal products and Phytotherapy. These courses aim at
providing the students with necessary knowledge related to Pharmacognosy and the various
applications of using natural products in pharmaceutical, medical and nutraceutical fileds. The
Courses also help the student to distinguish between different medicinal plants whether in crude
or powdered forms and to identify the bioactivities of different phytochemicals such as alkaloids,
volatile oils, glycosides, carbohydrates, phenolics,,....etc.).

In addition, the courses provide relevant information regarding the methods of extraction and
preparation of these substances, along with their analysis and structure identification by various
chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques. In the senior year, students acquire the knowledge
about the basics of phytotherapy and complementary medicine. The department also supervises
other courses like: Psychology and Social sciences and provide various activities to students,
including volatile oil galleries, entrepreneurship, various internships.