Recently, the use of herbal medicines has been increased all over the world due to their therapeutic effects and fewer adverse effects as compared to the modern medicines. However, many herbal drugs and herbal extracts despite of their impressive in-vitro findings demonstrates less or negligible in-vivo activity due to their poor lipid solubility or improper molecular size, resulting in poor absorption and hence poor bioavailability. Nowadays with the advancement in the technology, novel drug delivery systems open the door towards the development of enhancing bioavailability of herbal drug delivery systems. For last one decade many novel carriers such as liposomes, microspheres, nanoparticles, transferosomes, ethosomes, lipid based systems etc. have been reported for successful modified delivery of various herbal drugs. Many herbal compounds including have demonstrated capability to enhance the bioavailability.
‘Bioavailability enhancers’ are drug/supplement facilitators, they are the molecules which by themselves do not show typical medicinal activity but when used in combination they enhance the activity of the medicinal molecule in several ways including increasing bioavailability of it across the membrane and making target cells more receptive to it's medicinal ability. A ‘bioenhancer’ is an agent capable of enhancing bioavailability and bioefficacy of a particular drug/herb with which it is combined, without any typical pharmacological activity of its own at the dose used.
These are also termed as ‘absorption enhancers’ which are functional excipients included in formulations to improve the absorption of a pharmacologically active ingredient.
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