Advancing herbal medicine through metabolic pathway analysis in plants and animals for routine pharmacological assessments

Due to the complexity of herbal medicine, the determination of efficacy remains a significant hurdle in the field compared to modern drugs. Despite the lack of robust regulations, use of herbal medicine has been growing continuously. Many scientific approaches have been initiated to normalize herbal therapies over the years including structural similarity, QSAR and SAR. However, studying the structural similarity of primary and secondary plant herbal metabolites does not always give information on what pharmacological effects they may have on humans. The metabolic pathways discovered in plants that overlap with similar pathways in humans, with regards to similar energy consumption/metabolic pathways, could potentially be used to determine the efficacy of herbal therapies. This was assessed in this study through existing KEGG database and literature information through analysis of metabolic pathway graph and structural similarity of the metabolites using manual observation of pathways and similarity software. Determining the biological effects of a medicinal plant through utilization of similar metabolic pathways could provide the potential pharmacological efficacy or adverse effects and thus an integrated biological approach comparing human and plant metabolic signaling networks could be additionally productive to ascertain the regulatory and biological processes conferred by the metabolites and their bioactivity pathways in living systems.