Therapeutic Effects of Herbal Medicines: How Can We Best Investigate Bioactive Metabolites?

Herbal medicines contain hundreds or even thousands of primary and secondary metabolites, and it is a vital task for pharmacologists to explore which components contribute to the therapeutic effects of herbal medicines and which compounds do not. The complexity and low content of the chemical constituents of these metabolites in herbal medicines pose complex challenges. Up to now, the active components of most herbal medicines remain obscure, which hinders further pharmacological study and development of herbal medicines.

In general, the absorption of these metabolites needs to be understood in order to evaluate their potential therapeutic effects. Up to now, pharmacologists have tried many methods and techniques to explore the pharmacodynamics of herbal medicines. This includes the in vivo characterization of metabolites by pharmaco-metabonomics techniques or ex vivo models focusing on the delivery, for example, in the gastrointestinal tract.

This Research Topic aims to attract innovative original contributions in the interdisciplinary area in order to understand the relative contribution of different compounds or compound classes to reported pharmacological effects.

We welcome Original Research and Review articles, among other article types, focusing on the following subtopics, but not limited to:
• Profiling of metabolites’ pharmacokinetics in vivo.
• New unreported biological activities.
• New biological targets.
• New bioactive compounds as leads for the pharmaceutical industry.

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All the manuscripts submitted to this project will be peer-reviewed and need to fully comply with the Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version here).

Keywords: Herbal Medicines, Pharmacodynamics, Pharmacological effects, Pharmacokinetics, Bioactive Compounds, Bioactive Metabolites

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.