From Ethnobotany towards Modern Botanicals as Paradigm of the Medicinal Plants Research: The Case of Ayurveda

The research and the ongoing upgrading of the knowledge about medicinal plants compulsorily start from the ethnobotanical uses of plant sources and their cultural meaning in a social context. Ethnobotanical data can drive the research towards health uses, functional and coherent with social and cultural evidence concerning medicinal plants and reflecting phytochemical and biological evidence reported by modern research. Moreover, the crucial role of ethnobotany is enhanced by the fact that it might provide historical evidence about medicinal uses of certain plants suggesting efficacy and safety aspects of their modern usage as botanicals. This latter concept is particularly important because it fills in part the gap given by the absence of clinical evidence to pharmaceutically attest the efficacy and safety of plant preparations giving the opportunity to market crude drugs, extracts and traditional preparations as Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) botanicals. Taking the ayurveda as paradigm of the traditional medicines recognized as non-conventional ones by the European Union and by most Member States, it could be stressed that it uses more than 7000 plants for therapeutic purposes, most of them scarcely known under all or some of the aspects above considered. Moreover, the effects on human health of the often complex ayurvedic formulations are well described in the ethnobotanical literature sources, but the biological basis proving their efficacy is still poorly investigated. Despite this lack of knowledge, often associated with a non-coherent and fragmented research, several plants belonging to the ayurveda are commercially available in food supplements distributed within the EU, in the absence of a precise legal status. Furthermore, neither plant drugs used by ayurvedic medicine nor formulated products prepared according to the instructions of the Indian ayurvedic pharmacopoeia are mentioned within the reports of committees like EMEA and are absent in the lists of drugs allowed / not allowed by the Ministry of Health of Countries belonging to European Community. This context related to ayurveda as paradigm of traditional medicines supports the general premises related to the lack of knowledge about i) botanical sources of traditional medicines and their preparations, ii) their quality control, iii) the efficacy and safety of these herbal drugs and their derivatives. Thus, very little information are available to the legislator limiting the possibility to validate ethnomedicines and their botanicals as effective health remedies also under a normative point of view, minimizing de facto also their market. To fill this gap, the following project profile is purposed as research pattern about studying medicinal plant. The research, still in progress, is funded by MIUR (Research and University Italian Ministry) of Italy with the aim to shed a light on some ayurvedic preparations and the above mentioned related criticisms (project code: 2009LR9YLF; results acquired reported at www. ayurprint.org/). The modern study of medicinal plants needs to have phytochemical and biological research strategies strictly interactive and supported by a multi-disciplinary approach. Only through this perspective, the research on medicinal plants will reach important targets regarding 1) scientific validation of crude drugs and preparations; 2) quality control parameters; 3) safety protocols and drug vigilance parameters definition with marketing importance; 4) new health perspectives for natural lead compounds, phytocomplexes and their fractions.