Strategies for Integral Metabolism Profile of Multiple Compounds in Herbal Medicines: Pharmacokinetics, Metabolites Characterization and Metabolic Interactions

Herbal medicines (HMs) are gaining more and more attention all over the world, because of their significant curative effect in treating multi-factorial diseases. Recently, the in vivo and in vitro metabolism study of HMs has become an important issue because these data can help us to better understand the efficacies and toxicities of HMs. However, the integral metabolism profile of HMs is confronted with many challenges: 1) HM is a multi-component system; 2) most components are unknown (nontarget); 3) trace of components in HM. Given the challenges described above, the demand for more powerful bioanalytical tools and strategies that are adequate for integral metabolism profile of HMs' multi-components has increased. In the past few years, newer methods, or adaptations to methods, have been published, and this review will attempt to discuss new improvements in strategies and methodologies for HMs' multi-component ADME evaluation. In particular, improvements have been reported for experimental approaches to pharmacokinetics study of HMs, as well as strategies applied to metabolites characterization of HMs' multi-components, and the metabolic interactions between ingredients in HMs, including advance and proposed strategy: “chemical fishing” based strategy for metabolic interactions of HMs.