Phytosomes as a Novel Approach for Herbal Phytoconstituents

1. Introduction

Phytosomes are modern natural products that are formed by binding of individual component of herbal extract to phosphatidylcholine. and gives a improved conventional herbal extracts. It is advantageous in delivering the herbal drug at predetermined rate, Increase in bioavailability of drugs, delivery of drug at the targeted site, minimizes the toxic effects, Control of the distribution of drug is achieved by incorporate the drug in carrier system or in changing the structure of the drug at molecular level. Herbal drug are becoming more popular in the modern world for their applications and safety aspects which has enhanced absorption and bioavailability (Semalty et al., 2010; Gandhi et al., 2012). The bioavailability can be markedly superior with the utilization of different novel combined form of two words i.e. ‘Phyto’ means plant & ‘somes’ means cell like. The pharma world constantly works and struggle to make such type of formulations which can show greater absorption and bioavailability in comparison to the previous one, specially for phytoconstituents (Kalita et al., 2013). In this recently developed technology, the water-soluble phytoconstituents are incorporated into lipid compatible moiety to cross the lipid biomembranes and enters into systemic circulations, which shows better absorption because they can easily cross the various membranes (Jadhav et al., 2014). This technology is widely use for some compounds like terpenoids and flavonoids.The phytosome operation gives birth to a little cell whereby the precious plant extracts are preserved from deadening bydigestive enzymes and gut bacteria. Phytosomes are healthier to shift from a hydrophilic domain into the lipid-friendly domain of the enterocyte cell membrane and from there into the cell finally accomplishing the blood the molecular organization of liposomes and phytosomes is shown in figure 1. (Jain et al., 2010)

Figure 1.

Molecular organization of liposomes and phytosomes