Editorial: Metabolomics and Ethnopharmacology in the Development of Herbal and Traditional Medicine

Topic Metabolomics and Ethnopharmacology in the Development of Herbal and Traditional MedicineHerbal and traditional medicines are again gaining popularity around the world for the management of a variety of health problems.As the use of herbal/traditional medicines and other botanical products grows and more new products are introduced to the market, new and efficient methods to assess safety and efficacy become a major concern for researchers in drug development.It is important to understand the composition, safety, effectiveness, drug-drug or drug-food interactions, and also the possible side effects of traditionally used herbal medicines.The safety and efficacy data for herbal and traditional medicines are presently insufficient to meet the requirements for their worldwide use.Traditional medicines are derived from local and empirical knowledge often transmitted orally and have been developed over generations.The traditional healers of Indian AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa, and Homeopathy), traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and other traditional systems of medicine mainly emphasize on holistic approaches with a focus on therapeutic practice and outcomes.Metabolomics and the metabolomic profiling of herbal medicines and medicinal plants have provided new avenues of research in drug development.Metabolomic approaches allow the simultaneous identification of thousands of metabolites present in medicinal plants or herbal medicines.Furthermore, these support the mechanistic understanding of the concept of multicomponent multitarget effects and polypharmacology as well as the holistic approaches of treatments as per the AYUSH and other traditional systems of medicine.Synergistic effects are often claimed in experimental and clinical studies using multicomponent herbal preparations.Incorporating omics technologies into the assessment of the mode of action of herbal and traditional medicine will help in rationalizing the biological effects by unfolding the possible mechanism of synergistic actions.Such tools will allow us to explore the possibilities of standardization of multi-component extracts and formulations, for dereplication, and prediction of toxicity and safety of herbal preparations.Such a system biology approach should include network pharmacology assessments as well.Metabolomics is one of the techniques used to identify targeted and untargeted metabolites for scientific validation and the development of herbal and traditional medicine, especially by using

Abstract licence: CC BY

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