Novel Approaches in Herbal Formulations

1.1 Background

Since very old days herbal medications have been broadly utilized worldwide and have been used by doctors and patients for their beneficial qualities as they have fewer adverse effects when compared with allopathic drugs. Herbal drugs have complex structure of many active constituents from which all of them provide synergistic action and enhance the therapeutic value.

In development of novel herbal formulation, nano-sized dosage forms like polymeric nanoparticles, liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, phytosomes, transferosomes, and nanoemulsion has a number of advantages for herbal drugs, including enhancement of solubility and bioavailability, reducing toxicity, increasing the pharmacological activity, enhancement of stability, improve tissue macrophage distribution, sustained delivery as well as provide protection from physical and chemical degradation. Thus, the nano-sized novel herbal drug delivery has a potential future for enhancing the activity and overcoming problems associated with the plant medicines (Sarangi et al., 2018). For example, liposomes act as effective vehicles to deliver anti-cancer agents by increasing amount of drug at the site of tumor and decrease the accumulation of drug at site of normal tissues thereby preventing tissue toxicity effects (Bhokare et al., 2016). Phytosome is a novel technology developed by a leading manufacturer of drugs and nutraceuticals, to incorporate plant extracts or water soluble phytoconsituents into phospholipids to produce lipid compatible molecular complexes (Sachan et al., 2015). Other approaches like microspheres, nanoemulsions, polymeric nanoparticles and so forth have been proved beneficial to carry herbal drug.

Herbal medications: Herbal medications mean dosage form consisting of one or more herbs or processed herbs in indicated amounts to provide specific nutritional, cosmetic benefits or other benefits meant for use to diagnose, treat and moderate infections of individual or animals (Afrin et al., 2018).

1.2 Advantages of Herbal Medications

• 1.

  Low risk of side effects: Mostly natural medications are secure for patient, having less unintended impact and fewer symptoms than customary prescription.

• 2.

  Greater effectivity: Herbal drugs are more effective for longer health complaints that don't respond well to traditional medicine. Here, example is the herbs and alternative remedies used to treat arthritis.

• 3.

  Minimal effort: Cost of natural medications is much less than prescribed medications. Research, testing and advertising increase significantly to the cost of prescription drug compare to natural medicines.

• 4.

  Broad accessibility: Herbs are accessible in wide amount. As simple herbs like chamomile and peppermint can be cultivated at home (Bhokare et al., 2016; Kharat et al.,2014).

1.3 Drawback of Herbal Medications

There are not many restrictions of herbal medications, for example,

• 1.Herbal medications show instability in exceedingly acidic pH, pre systemic metabolism in liver, solubility, and absorption problems, which may lead to drug levels below therapeutic concentration in the plasma, hence give less or no therapeutic effects.

  • 2.

    Most of the plant actives like glycosides, tannins, flavonoids, and so forth, are polar in nature and are ineffectively absorbed due to large molecular size which may limits the absorption via passive diffusion and poor lipid solubility severely limits their ability to cross the lipid-rich biological membranes, due to which bioavailability reduced which give low therapeutic index of plant actives (Goyal et al., 2011).