Pharmacology and Toxicology of herbal products: the need for integrated actions

Herbal medicines are nowadays used throughout the world, either as a primary care resource or as complementary or alternative medicines. Given the large number of herbal products used, and the relatively low budgets available for research to date, pharmacological and safety assessments have been carried out on relatively few herbs and, quite often, long-standing uses are generally considered a plausible indication of efficacy and safety.
Nevertheless, the reasoned development of safe and efficacious herbal drugs requires integrated studies of quality, pharmacology, toxicology and clinical safety and efficacy:

• To catalog available pharmacological and toxicological data for selected herbal medicines, their extracts and phytochemicals;
• To organize and conduct research projects that integrate both classical and omic pharmacology;
• To identify relevant end-points for major toxicities and reliable methods to measure them;
• To develop good practice guidelines for in vitro, in vivo and omic pharmacological and toxicological tests
• To promote integration of pharmacology and toxicology, as well as pharmacology, toxicology and other aspects of herbal medicine studies