Research Projects

Herbal Dietary supplements (HDs) are increasingly used as alternative medicines worldwide, but herb-drug interactions (HDI) can cause unwanted adverse effects. HDs contain phytochemicals that interact with drug-metabolizing enzymes, such as cytochrome P450 (CYP), which are metabolized by most clinically used drugs. Changes in CYP activity initiated by HDs can alter the pharmacokinetics of co-administered drugs, resulting in reduced pharmacological effects or toxicity. Therefore, systematic knowledge of HDI, particularly on drug absorption, metabolism, elimination, and drug transport, is necessary to ensure patient safety. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.s. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have suggested guidelines for HDI studies and recommend PK-based HDI studies for phytopharmaceuticals under development and those in the market. Omics-related techniques offer a more extensive way to study drug-drug interactions, and recent studies have proposed the use of transcriptome analysis for better understanding HDIs and their related complexities. The present study investigates whether selected HDs may interact with selected cardiovascular drugs, anticancer agents, and antibiotics, resulting in alteration of pharmacokinetic parameters. It provides a rationale for avoiding concurrent administration of HDs with strong CYP inhibitors and inducers, and explains appropriate safety monitoring studies when HDs are concurrently administered with P-gp substrates and inhibitors. It also helps identify if co-administration of HDs improves the PK/PD of co-administered drugs, suggesting that combination therapy might be beneficial for improving therapeutic efficacy.