Herb–Drug Interactions: Current Progress and Future Trends

Dear Colleagues,

The concurrent use of herbal supplements with many conventional drugs is on the rise on a global scale and potentially contributing to a lack of efficacy, adverse effects, and high costs of medical treatments. This is commonly referred as Herb–Drug Interactions (HDIs).

From an evolutionary point of view, it could be argued that synthetic medications themselves are the sources of interference, since the human pharmacokinetic system has already been pre-conditioned to work with secondary products of natural origin primarily as food. Therefore, herbal medicines share the same drug metabolizing enzymes and drug transporters with several clinically important drugs. Thus, current methods for evaluating the pharmacokinetics of pharmaceutical drugs have been adapted for the evaluation of herbal medicines and in so doing are useful for predicting potential herb–drug interactions.

The biggest challenge in the identification of potential HDIs is that herbal medicines are not subject to the same ‘rigid’ pre-clinical and clinical assessments and regulations as those carried out with new drug entities. Therefore, researchers face a lack of funding and incentives to work on this subject.

This Special Issue aims to attract contributions from both pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics (ADME) of natural products as well as protocols adapted to the chemical complexity of herbal drugs and substances with a view to predict potential HDIs.

Dr. Jose M. Prieto-Garcia
Guest Editor

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