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NMR based Pharmaco-metabolomics: An efficient and agile tool for therapeutic evaluation of Traditional Herbal Medicines

Traditional Indian (Ayurvedic) and Chinese herbal medicines have been used in the treatment of a variety of diseases for thousands of years because of their natural origin and lesser side effects. However, the safety and efficacy data (including dose and quality parameters) on most of these traditional medicines are far from sufficient to meet the criteria needed to support their world-wide therapeutic use. Also, the mechanistic understanding of most of these herbal medicines is still lacking due to their complex components which further limits their wider application and acceptance. Metabolomics -a novel approach to reveal altered metabolism (biochemical effects) produced in response to a disease or its therapeutic intervention- has huge potential to assess the pharmacology and toxicology of traditional herbal medicines (THMs). Therefore, it is gradually becoming a mutually complementary technique to genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics for therapeutic evaluation of pharmaceutical products (including THMs); the approach is so called pharmaco-metabolomics. The whole paradigm is based on its ability to provide metabolic signatures to confirm the diseased condition and then to use the concentration profiles of these biomarkers to assess the therapeutic response. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy coupled with multivariate data analysis is currently the method of choice for pharmaco-metabolomics studies owing to its unbiased, non-destructive nature and minimal sample preparation requirement. In recent past, dozens of NMR based pharmaco-metabolomic studies have been devoted to prove the therapeutic efficacy/safety and to explore the underlying mechanisms of THMs, with promising results. The current perspective article summarizes various such studies in addition to describing the technical and conceptual aspects involved in NMR based pharmaco-metabolomics.