Novel drug delivery systems for herbal remedies.

Abstract

Herbal remedies have a long standing history of use in traditional medicine, and are the sources of important drugs such as atropine, codeine, digoxin, morphine, quinine and vincristine used in allopathic medicine. During the past few decades, the enormous interest in safe and cost effective personalized medicine among the western world has led to a resurgence of interest in traditional herbal remedies. Hence, most of the synthetic medications are being gradually replaced by herbal therapeutics. Despite the advantages, traditional herbal regimes have their limitations of instability at high pH, less bioavailability, low solubility and poor patient compliance. Importantly, most of the phytochemicals (such as flavonoids, tannins, terpenoids, etc.) exert poor bioavailability due to their large molecular size which cannot be absorbed by passive diffusion, or due to their poor lipid solubility. Novel drug delivery systems address these limitations and ensure the successful delivery to the targeted site. These formulations are reported to have remarkable advantages over conventional formulations of plant actives which include enhancement of solubility, bioavailability, protection from toxicity, enhancement of pharmacological activity, enhancement of stability. Thus, the application of this novel technology enabled the integration of traditional medicine into mainstream medicine Polymeric nanoparticles, nano-capsules, liposomes, phytosomes, nano-emulsions, microsphere, transferosomes, and ethosomes are the most common forms of carriers used in novel drug delivery systems. These formulations increase the efficiency of traditional remedies, with concurrent minimization of side effects of high dosages.