Drug development from natural products: exploiting synergistic effects.

Drug development in phytomedicine has been focused in the past on the discovery and analysis of new structures from natural products. The search aimed at the determination of the single "active principle" in plants, based on the assumption that a plant has one or a few ingredients which determine its therapeutic effects. But traditional systems of medicines like Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine or the European phytotherapy generally assume that a synergy of all ingredients of the plants will bring about the maximum of therapeutic efficacy.

New perspectives for synergy research with the "omic"-technologies.

Synergistic effects, understood as true overadditive effects, are often observed in experimental and clinical studies using phytopharmaceuticals. The introduction of the "omic"-technologies is now opening new perspectives in rationalizing these effects and making use of them in the development of a new generation of phytopharmaceuticals. This review describes possible mechanism of synergistic actions of herbal drugs by mono- and multitargeting and by the activation of signal cascades.