Application of Mid-Infrared Spectroscopy on Therapeutic Effects of Herbal Medicine in Infectious Diseases

Although a wide range of drug therapies fighting pathogenic agents have been developed since the late 19th century, infectious diseases such as pneumonia, flu, tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria still cost millions of lives. As per the World Health Organization (WHO) and Center for Infectious Disease Research estimates, the mortality rates of many infectious diseases may have actually worsened over the past few years. Development of new herbal compounds, understanding the effects of interactions between food and herbal medicines, and validating the traditional local combinations of plant use would be sophisticated revenues of research on the therapeutic effects of herbal medicine in infectious diseases. There is certainly a need for further collaborative biological screening of plant extracts in single, or combination forms and further interdisciplinary research in order to understand their interactions with biological systems. Infrared (IR) spectroscopy is a versatile analytical technique that has valuable applications in several areas such as biomedical sciences, pharmacy, engineering, chemistry, biophysics, food, plant science and toxicology. The combination of IR spectroscopy and chemometrics offers fast and powerful techniques for the separation and verification of herbal medicines-disease interactions. IR spectroscopy is widely used for the confirmation (identification), qualitative and quantitative analysis of herbal medicines and pharmaceutical products, and to determine how effective it is in the treatment of diseases. It requires small amounts of samples, and so is relatively nondestructive, accurate and does not require a reagent, so it is more ecofriendly than biochemical processes. There are only a limited number of published studies on the application of FTIR spectroscopy to herbal medicine - infectious disease interactions. Therefore, it is certainly a very promising and open research area.

Keywords: Chemometrics, Herbal Medicines, Infectious Diseases, Infrared (IR) Spectroscopy, Laboratory Methods for Biocompatible Drug Discovery.