TY  - JOUR
A1  - Abdel Tawab, Mona
T1  - Considerations to be taken when carrying out medicinal plant research : what we learn from an insight into the IC50 values, bioavailability and clinical efficacy of exemplary anti-inflammatory herbal components
T2  - Pharmaceuticals
N2  - Medicinal plants represent a big reservoir for discovering new drugs against all kinds of diseases including inflammation. In spite the large number of promising anti-inflammatory plant extracts and isolated components, research on medicinal plants proves to be very difficult. Based on that background this review aims to provide a summarized insight into the hitherto known pharmacologically active concentrations, bioavailability, and clinical efficacy of boswellic acids, curcumin, quercetin and resveratrol. These examples have in common that the achieved plasma concentrations were found to be often far below the determined IC50 values in vitro. On the other hand demonstrated therapeutic effects suggest a necessity of rethinking our pharmacokinetic understanding. In this light this review discusses the value of plasma levels as pharmacokinetic surrogates in comparison to the more informative value of tissue concentrations. Furthermore the need for new methodological approaches is addressed like the application of combinatorial approaches for identifying and pharmacokinetic investigations of active multi-components. Also the physiological relevance of exemplary in vitro assays and absorption studies in cell-line based models is discussed. All these topics should be ideally considered to avoid inaccurate predictions for the efficacy of herbal components in vivo and to unlock the “black box” of herbal mixtures.
KW  - medicinal plant
KW  - boswellic acids
KW  - curcumin
KW  - quercetin
KW  - resveratrol
KW  - bioavailability
KW  - tissue-plasma-ratio
KW  - tissue distribution
KW  - metabolomics
KW  - combinatorial approaches
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62115
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-621151
SN  - 1424-8247
VL  - 14
IS  - 5, art. 437
SP  - 1
EP  - 34
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -