Approaches towards Development and Promotion of Herbal Drugs

Herbal drugs have great growth potential in the global market. Natural product research continues to explore Indian Traditional Medicines to develop new novel drugs. In this paper we have focused on the strategies, significance, guidelines and the research methods to be followed in order to develop herbal medicines which will gain international acceptance. Chromatographic fingerprinting techniques are most significant methods which can be used for the routine herbal drug analysis and for quality assurance. The WHO guideline parameters are discussed and some in vitro models for antioxidant studies, cytotoxic studies , are given in flow chart form in order to provide simple and effective assessment of the biological screening of botanicals without animal models or extensive extraction and purification steps.