Essential oil phytocomplex activity, a review with a focus on multivariate analysis for a network pharmacology-informed phytogenomic approach

Thanks to omic disciplines and a systems biology approach, the study of essential oils and phytocomplexes has been lately rolling on a faster track. While metabolomic fingerprinting can provide an effective strategy to characterize essential oil contents, network pharmacology is revealing itself as an adequate, holistic platform to study the collective effects of herbal products and their multi-component and multi-target mediated mechanisms. Multivariate analysis can be applied to analyze the effects of essential oils, possibly overcoming the reductionist limits of bioactivity-guided fractionation and purification of single components. Thanks to the fast evolution of bioinformatics and database availability, disease-target networks relevant to a growing number of phytocomplexes are being developed. With the same potential actionability of pharmacogenomic data, phytogenomics could be performed based on relevant disease-target networks to inform and personalize phytocomplex therapeutic application

Phytotherapy in India: transition of tradition to technology

The disease preventive and health promoting approach based on herbal medicine takes into consideration, the promotion of health and treating ailments is holistic way and finds increasing acceptability in many regions of the world, India and China being in the forefront. The practice of herbal medicine basically depends on folklore and by experiences of people over a long period of time. However, very little research especially in the area of basic science has been conducted in a systematic manner. Medicinal plants with a long history of safe and effective use are likely to have a pharmaceutical effect. The use of plants in traditional medicine can be explained by physiologically active phytochemical compounds of a species and also by its ascribed meaning in a culture.  Plants produce a great diversity of substances that could be of therapeutic significance in many areas of medicine. However, the chemical nature of plant compounds present naturally as such and in extract, is puzzling. It is important to know constituents of plant extracts and their relative importance in their therapeutic value. The alkaloids and other compounds are characterized and tested for their medicinal value from these plants which include not only the unexplored tribal plants but also the spices, condiments and vegetables which are already in use. In last decade, there is a renewed interest in the development of herbal drugs underlined by the understanding of mechanism of action rather than based on faith and folk, as it happened in past. Several aspects on integrated approaches of drug development from herbs have explored many potential lead phytochemicals. Nonetheless, even the limited number of mechanistic experiments reveals that numerous mechanisms are likely involved in the various actions of even a single herbal medicine. It will be the elucidation of such mechanisms that will provide the scientific basis for establishing the efficacy and safety of not only Chinese and Indian herbal medicines but all forms of medicinal botanicals

Pharmacokinetic Herb-Drug Interactions: Insight into Mechanisms and Consequences

Herbal medicines are currently in high demand, and their popularity is steadily increasing. Because of their perceived effectiveness, fewer side effects and relatively low cost, they are being used for the management of numerous medical conditions. However, they are capable of affecting the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of coadministered conventional drugs. These interactions are particularly of clinically relevance when metabolizing enzymes and xenobiotic transporters, which are responsible for the fate of many drugs, are induced or inhibited, sometimes resulting in unexpected outcomes. This article discusses the general use of herbal medicines in the management of several ailments, their concurrent use with conventional therapy, mechanisms underlying herb-drug interactions (HDIs) as well as the drawbacks of herbal remedy use. The authors also suggest means of surveillance and safety monitoring of herbal medicines. Contrary to popular belief that "herbal medicines are totally safe," we are of the view that they are capable of causing significant toxic effects and altered pharmaceutical outcomes when coadministered with conventional medicines. Due to the paucity of information as well as sometimes conflicting reports on HDIs, much more research in this field is needed. The authors further suggest the need to standardize and better regulate herbal medicines in order to ensure their safety and efficacy when used alone or in combination with conventional drugs

Traditional medicine-inspired approaches to drug discovery: can Ayurveda show the way forward?

Drug discovery strategies based on natural products and traditional medicines are re-emerging as attractive options. We suggest that drug discovery and development need not always be confined to new molecular entities. Rationally designed, carefully standardized, synergistic traditional herbal formulations and botanical drug products with robust scientific evidence can also be alternatives. A reverse pharmacology approach, inspired by traditional medicine and Ayurveda, can offer a smart strategy for new drug candidates to facilitate discovery process and also for the development of rational synergistic botanical formulations

The use of omic technologies applied to traditional Chinese medicine research

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Identification of the active compounds and significant pathways of yinchenhao decoction based on network pharmacology

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Herb Target Prediction Based on Representation Learning of Symptom related Heterogeneous Network.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has received increasing attention as a complementary approach or alternative to modern medicine. However, experimental methods for identifying novel targets of TCM herbs heavily relied on the current available herb-compound-target relationships. In this work, we present an Herb-Target Interaction Network (HTINet) approach, a novel network integration pipeline for herb-target prediction mainly relying on the symptom related associations. HTINet focuses on capturing the low-dimensional feature vectors for both herbs and proteins by network embedding, which incorporate the topological properties of nodes across multi-layered heterogeneous network, and then performs supervised learning based on these low-dimensional feature representations. HTINet obtains performance improvement over a well-established random walk based herb-target prediction method. Furthermore, we have manually validated several predicted herb-target interactions from independent literatures. These results indicate that HTINet can be used to integrate heterogeneous information to predict novel herb-target interactions

Pharmacognosy: Importance and Drawbacks

In many nations of the world, a great number of deaths and morbidity arising from illnesses are witnessed due to lack of basic health care. Phytotherapy has continued to play a significant role in the prevention and treatment of diseases (communicable and noncommunicable). Interestingly, more than 80% of the global populations now adopt phytotherapy as a basic source of maintaining good healthy conditions, owing to the pronounced side effects, nonavailability, and expensive nature of conventional treatment options. While this review looked at the prospects and downsides of phytomedicine as it relates to the national health care system, it established the fact that although a number of medicinal plants had been resourceful (effective) against a range of diseases, with few developed into drugs based on the available phytotherapeutics, quite a large number of them are yet to scale through clinical trials to determine their safety and efficacy. It is believed that until this is done, we hope phytomedicine to be adopted or integrated into the national health care system in many countries