Title : Herbal medicine and drug development: Why focusing on plant-based products for innovation and green pharmaceutical industry
Abstract:
Medical products, including drugs and vaccines, are critically important for healthcare delivery worldwide. Unfortunately, healthcare system continues to face profound challenges, among which limited access to safe, efficacious, good quality and affordable conventional drugs; numerous adverse effects, iatrogenic and toxicity of synthetic drugs, development of resistance to those drugs by many ailments and pathogens. Due to those challenges, about 80% of the world’s population still relies on herbal medicines (HM) for basic care or management of challenging diseases. This contribution reviews the relevance of HM components and emphasizes their strengths and weaknesses as competitive advantages and genuine opportunities to promote green industries. HM are almost made up of more than one plant species and additional fungi, mineral and animal parts, and often contain numerous compounds. These multicompounds, intrinsically linked to biological properties, are synthesized and concentrated optimally in certain plant taxa and organs, and subjected to dynamic change during plant growth development. Been used for centuries, HM strengths included availability of plant resources and know-how for HM preparation and administration. As weaknesses, those resources and know-how are diverse and variable according to plant species, regions, socio-economic and cultural factors, methods of HM preparation and administration; making their standardization a herculean task due to their complex nature. Presently, few official compendia and validated techniques are available for universal HM evaluation and manufacture. Fortunately, the preparation and safety, already understood in traditional knowledge systems, lead to faster and more inexpensively investments in phytomedicine production, innovation, drug research and development processes. Also, the easy biodegradability of HM raw material makes them superior from an environmental point of view, with benefits including waste reduction, lower greenhouse gas emissions, poverty alleviation, harmful chemicals or pollutants volume reduction. But their seasonal production varies widely in quality and quantity, raising concerns on raw material sourcing and quality assurance. The multicompound and targets of HM, acting on more than one receptor and having several broad actions (complementary or synergistic) on physiological systems at the same time, justify the wide range of benefits and constitute a therapeutic arsenal against multidrug resistant microorganisms. However, multicompound plant extracts are always difficult to test. The chemical structure of those compounds ranges from simple skeleton to far more complex molecules, that are even not possible to synthesize in laboratory conditions for some, or lead to laborious, inappropriate and costly synthesis for industrial production. Fortunately, hemisynthesis of some such as Artemisinin and its by-products, serves as precursor and represents one of the paths of therapeutic innovation. Thus, managers should rethink their views and choices, weigh the health and economic issues to empower the current synthetic drugs companies, or to explore HM as resources for less iatrogenic and more efficient multicomponent treatments and innovative green industries.
