| Abstrak/Abstract |
Herbal drugs or herbal medicines (HMs) have a long-standing history as natural remedies for preventing and curing diseases. HMs have garnered greater interest during the past decades due to their broad, synergistic actions on the physiological systems and relatively lower incidence of adverse events, compared to synthetic drugs. However, assuring reproducible quality, efficacy, and safety from herbal drugs remains a challenging task. HMs typically consist of many constituents whose presence and quantity may vary among different sources of materials. Fingerprint analysis has emerged as a very useful technique to assess the quality of herbal drug materials and formulations for establishing standardized herbal products. Rather than using a single or two marker(s), fingerprinting techniques take great consideration on the complexity of herbal drugs by evaluating the whole chemical profile and extracting a common pattern to be set as a criterion for assessing the individual material or formulation. In this review, we will describe and assess various fingerprinting techniques reported to date which are applicable to herbal drug standardization and quality control. We will also evaluate the application of multivariate data analysis or chemometrics in assisting the analysis of the complex datasets from the determination of HMs. To ensure that these methods yield reliable results, we will review the validation status of the methods and provide perspectives on those. Finally, we will conclude by highlighting major accomplishments and presenting a gap analysis between the existing techniques and what is needed to continue moving forward. |
