Tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization, with approximately one third of the world's population being latently infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis treatment consists in an intensive phase and a continuation phase. Unfortunately, the appearance of multi drug-resistant tuberculosis, mainly due to low adherence to prescribed therapies or inefficient healthcare structures, requires at least 20 months of treatment with second-line, more toxic and less efficient drugs, i.e., capreomycin, kanamycin, amikacin and fluoroquinolones. Therefore, there exists an urgent need for discovery and development of new drugs to reduce the global burden of this disease, including the multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. To this end, many plant species, as well as marine organisms and fungi have been and continue to be used in various traditional healing systems around the world to treat tuberculosis, thus representing a nearly unlimited source of active ingredients. Besides their antimycobacterial activity, natural products can be useful in adjuvant therapy to improve the efficacy of conventional antimycobacterial therapies, to decrease their adverse effects and to reverse mycobacterial multi-drug resistance due to the genetic plasticity and environmental adaptability of Mycobacterium. However, even if some natural products have still been investigated in preclinical and clinical studies, the validation of their efficacy and safety as antituberculosis agents is far from being reached, and, therefore, according to an evidence-based approach, more high-level randomized clinical trials are urgently needed.

结核病是世界卫生组织宣布的全球卫生紧急情况，是一种高度传染性疾病，约有三分之一的世界人口被结核分枝杆菌潜伏感染。结核病治疗包括强化阶段和持续阶段。不幸的是，多药耐药结核病的出现主要是由于对处方疗法的依从性差或医疗体系效率低下，因此至少需要使用二线，毒性更大和效率较低的药物进行20个月的治疗，即，红霉素，卡那霉素，丁胺卡那霉素和氟喹诺酮类。因此，迫切需要发现和开发新的药物以减轻该疾病的全球负担，包括耐多药结核病。为此，世界各地的许多传统治愈系统已经并且将继续使用许多植物物种以及海洋生物和真菌来治疗结核病，因此几乎代表了无限量的活性成分。除了它们的抗分支杆菌活性，天然产品可以是辅助治疗有用以提高常规抗分枝杆菌治疗的功效，以降低它们的不利影响和分枝杆菌多药抗性逆转由于遗传可塑性和的环境适应性分枝杆菌。然而，即使在临床前和临床研究中仍对某些天然产物进行了研究，其抗结核药的功效和安全性的验证仍遥遥无期，因此，根据循证方法，更高水平的随机分组迫切需要临床试验。