Novel decontamination approaches for stability and shelf-life improvement of herbal drugs: A concise review

Abstract

The market for herbal drugs has risen enormously in the current era, and it has led to the formulation of numerous medicinal herbs. However, many of the drug components may be affected by microbial metabolites, which have led to possible concerns regarding the stability and shelf-life of such formulations. Herbal products are frequently affected by degradation, particularly during storage, which can lead to loss of active constituents, synthesis of inactive metabolites, and production of toxic metabolites. These aspects need to be addressed in order to regulate the stability and efficacy of herbal drug formulations. In particular, pathogenic microorganisms, especially those able to form biofilms, can derive from different environments at various stages of herbal drug preparation. Thus, the stability and shelf-life could be improved by preventing microbial contamination of medicinal herb products during preparation, packaging, storage, and delivery. This review deals with problems induced by microbial pathogens and their biofilms and proposes novel decontamination approaches to reduce microbial contaminations to increase the stability and shelf-life of medicinal plants and their formulations.

Keywords

• Biofilms
• Drug stability
• Herbal formulation
• Microorganisms
• Shelf-life