Recent Advances in Standardization of Herbal Drugs

Abstract

Background: Herbal drugs play a significant role to maintain the human healthiness and to treat the ailments since the dawn of civilization. Moreover, these plants have provided many lead compounds that culminated in modern medicine. A single herb is regarded as mini-combinatorial library of phytoconstituents hence the quality control of herbal drugs in an herbal formulation is not an easy task because a number of factors impact their pharmacological efficiency and consistent therapeutic effects. Hence, to provide consistent beneficial therapeutic effects, standardized herbal products of consistent quality and purity are required. Methods: This review is based on publications obtained by a selective search in PubMed using the keywords “Standardized herbal products”, “fingerprinting”, “authentication”, “chemometric, hyphenated techniques”, “quality control of herbal drugs”, “identification”. Results: In the era of modernization, chromatographic techniques coupled with sophisticated spectroscopic analytical methods are used in estimating the authenticity, identity and characteristic of herbal products. Further, with the advancement of computer technology, chemometrics methods have become a leading tool with an unsupervised pattern recognition technique for handling multivariate data without prior knowledge about the studied samples and mines more beneficial and valuable information about the chemical entities from the raw data. Conclusion: Standardization of HDs chromatographic fingerprint is not always a perfect way to present all compounds. To assess the quality of medicinal plants, new ways are regularly being explored such as combination chemical fingerprint with biological methods, biofingerprint and metabolic fingerprint quality metrology, pharmacodynamics and export system of medicinal plants have been researched in some groups but still a significant amount of work is required to achieve a perfect system for quality evaluation of herbal drugs. Further, novel chemometric techniques have been unfolded that mines more beneficial and valuable information about the chemical entities from the raw data. So this review emphasis mainly on hyphenated techniques associated with chemometric method used in herbal drugs for identifying more valuable information and various methods for providing data, among which most commonly used techniques are chemometric resolution method and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method.