Pharmacokinetics and Drug Interactions of Herbal Medicines: A Missing Critical Step in the Phytomedicine/Drug Development Process

Discovering and developing safe and effective new medicines is a long, difficult and expensive process involving multi-billion dollar investments in Research and Development by research-based pharmaceutical industries yearly. On average, it will cost a pharmaceutical company up to $800m and upwards of 15 years to get one new medicine from the laboratory to the pharmacist's shelf. Only five in 5,000 compounds that enter preclinical testing will actually progress into human clinical trials, and of these five, only one is likely to be approved by the regulatory authorities using new drug approvals systems that are extremely rigorous, costly and time-consuming (1).