New Sustainable Herbal Drug Development in Ayurveda

The drug discovery process is becoming more and more complex and capital-intensive, and such companies remain ‘target rich’ but ‘lead poor’, with lead discovery as a greater bottleneck. In such a situation, industrialization of drug discovery process is underway. Although high throughput screening (HTS) and combinatorial chemical synthesis are explored with great hope, general experience tells us that in most companies the investments in these technologies have not reaped rewards in new lead discovery as expected. New drug discovery must overcome such problems and become more dynamic, focused and predictive, where safety and efficacy issues are addressed along side the developmental costs. Development of new chemical/molecular entity into therapeutic drugs takes several years and is capital-intensive. The risks are also high and the success rate not good. Powerful new technologies such as HTS and combinatorial chemistry are revolutionizing drug discovery. But natural products still offer unmatched structural variety, especially as new environmental niches are explored, and their usefulness can be further extended by engineering the proteins that produce them and using them to probe biological pathways. Rediscovery of the connection between plants and health is responsible for launching a new generation of botanical therapeutics that include plant-derived pharmaceuticals, multicomponent botanical drugs, dietary supplements, functional food and plant-produced recombinant proteins.

Ayurveda: a new discovery engine

Combining the strengths of the knowledge base of traditional systems such as Ayurveda with the dramatic power of combinatorial sciences and HTS will help in the generation of structure–activity libraries. Ayurvedic knowledge and experiential database can provide new functional leads to reduce time, money and toxicity – the three main hurdles in drug development. These records are particularly valuable, since effectively these medicines have been tested for thousands of years on people1. Efforts are underway to establish pharmacoepidemiological evidencebase regarding safety and practice of Ayurvedic medicines.

When, we consider the present trend of standardization, herbal drug development includes, various steps, starting from a passport data on raw materials, correct identification, pharmacognostic and chemical quality standardization, safety and preclinical pharmacology and randomized, controlled clinical trials.  The advanced knowledge of pharmacognosy, phytochemistry and pharmacogenomics has certainly helped in the quality control of Ayurvedic products and also in new drug discovery. But, the basic point to be borne in mind is that Ayurveda has its own principles, clinical oriented approach, and concept of using the herb as a whole (not the active principles. Understanding the concept of Dravyaguna and Bhaishajya Kalpana in depth is very essential to discover the new drugs in Ayurveda