Standardization of Herbal Drugs – A Overview

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The medicinal plants are important source for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Medicinal plants & herbal medicines account for a significant percentage of the pharmaceutical market. As the side effects of Synthetic medicine have started getting more apparent, majority of formulation are prepared from herbs. The herbal medicines however, suffer from lack of standardization parameters. The main limitation is the lack of standardization of raw materials, of processing methods and of the final products, dosage formulation, and the non existence of criteria for quality control. Herbal formulations have reached extensive acceptability as therapeutic agents for several diseases. The development of authentic analytical methods which can reliably profile the phytochemical composition, including quantitative analyses of marker/bioactive compounds and other major constituents, is a major challenge to scientists. Standardization is an important step for the establishment of a consistent biological activity, a consistent chemical profile, or simply a quality assurance program for production and manufacturing of herbal drugs.