Review on “Standardization an Imp Tool for Herbal Drug Development”

Abstract

The medicinal plants are important source for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Medicinal plants & herbal medicines account for a significant percentage of the pharmaceutical market. There is increasing awareness and general acceptability of the use of herbal drugs in today’s medical practice although most of these applications are not scientific. Herbal medicines are not a simple task since many factors influence the biological efficacy and Reproducible therapeutic effect. So it is necessary to improve safety of herbal drugs by developing certain quality control parameters & by following the WHO guidelines for herbal medicines. This review seeks to enlighten the need to establish quality parameters for collection, handling, processing and production of herbal medicine as well as employ such parameters in ensuring the safety of the global herbal market. It is necessary to introduce measures on the regulation of herbal medicines to ensure quality, safety, efficacy of herbal medicines by using modern suitable standards & GMP. The processes of good quality assurance and standardization of herbal medicines and products using various spectroscopic, chromatographic and electrophoretic methods were also discussed. In fact, the research field of quality control of herbal medicines is really an interdisciplinary research. It needs crossover of chemistry, pharmacology, medicine and even statistics to provide a platform for the quality control of traditional herbal medicines and further to discover the novel therapeutics composed of multiple chemical compounds. Keywords: Herbal drugs, Adulteration, Standardization, Chromatography, Electrophoresis, HP-LC and GC-MS.