Abstract
Dengue is a debilitating disease that poses a perpetual threat to human health and increases the global economic burden every year. Despite advances in medical sciences, dengue virus (DENV) infects approximately 200 million people every year. To date, no effective antiviral is valiable to treat DENV in individuals despite great efforts in accomplishing these goals. Numerous approaches have been used in the search for dengue antiviral like screening of combinatorial compounds against DENV enzymes and structure-based computational discovery. In recent years, investigators have turned their focus into medicinal plants, trying to identify compounds that can be used as dengue antiviral. Nature represents a great reservoir of potential substances that can be explored with the aim of discovering new drugs that can be either used directly as pharmaceuticals or can provide drug leads, which can be scrutinized further for the development of new anti-dengue natural product. Many previous investigations have dealt with numerous plant extracts or bioactive principles for their antiviral property as they normally considered being safer when compared to synthetic drugs. Andrographis paniculata belongs to family Acanthaceae and is generally known as 'king of bitters'. Diverse bioactive compounds from this plant such as diterpenes, flavonoids, xanthones, noriridoides and other miscellaneous compounds have exhibited their potential as therapeutics for various chronic as well as infectious diseases. This review is based on literature review on scientific journals, books and electronic sources, which highlights the pathogenesis of DENV and describe an assortment of bioactive principles that have been possessing antiviral potential, which include dengue and discuss the therapeutic efficacy and mechanism of action of Andrographis paniculata. However, a detailed and more comprehensive clinical trial on mammalian tissues and organs is needed in future studies.