Chinese herbal medicines are often complex in chemical composition and contain multiple bioactive constituents; the effectiveness and safety of an herbal medicine normally is governed by human body exposure to its bioactive constituents and/or their bioactive metabolites. Current pharmacokinetic research on Chinese herbal medicines reveals pharmacokinetic characteristics of their bioactive constituents, including the systemic exposure and metabolism, after dosing the medicines. Such findings should be applied to guide rational clinical use of Chinese herbal medicines and to support clinical research on drug therapies including Chinese herbal medicines. To this end, a class of xenobiotic markers was proposed for use and research of complex Chinese herbal medicines; because the markers’ identification results from pharmacokinetic research, they are referred to as pharmacokinetic markers (Lu et al., 2008; Hu et al., 2013; Li, 2017). Pharmacokinetic markers of a Chinese herbal medicine comprise herbal compounds, unchanged and/or metabolized, that are measurable by contemporary techniques and that can reflect human body exposure to the herbal compounds responsible for or potentially related to the medicine’s therapeutic action and the associated influencing factors. The usefulness of such markers identified from pharmacokinetic investigations could be expanded, e,g., pharmacokinetic markers are proposed to be potentially useful for reflecting abnormal cellular processes in patients receiving Chinese herbal medicine-included treatment and for predicting the prognosis in the patients (Zhang et al., 2018).
References
Hu Z-Y, Yang J-L, Cheng C, Huang Y-H, Du F-F, Wang F-Q, Niu W, Xu F, Jiang R-R, Gao X-M, and Li C (2013) Combinatorial metabolism notably affects human systemic exposure to ginsenosides from orally administered extract of Panax notoginseng roots (Sanqi). Drug Metab Dispos 41: 1457–1469.
Li C (2017) Multi-compound pharmacokinetic research on Chinese herbal medicines: approach and methodology. China J Chin Materia Medica 42: 607–617. (Chinese)
Lu T, Yang J-L, Gao X-M, Chen P, Du F-F, Sun Y, Wang F-Q, Xu F, Shang H-C, Huang Y-H, Wang Y, Wan R-Z, Liu C-X, Zhang B-L, and Li C (2008) Plasma and urinary tanshinol from Salvia miltiorrhiza (Danshen) can be used as pharmacokinetic markers for cardiotonic pills, a cardiovascular herbal medicine. Drug Metab Dispos 36: 1578–1586.
Zhang N-T., Cheng C., Olaleye O.E., Sun Y., Li L., Huang Y-H., Du F-F., Yang J-L., Wang F-Q., Shi Y-H., Xu F., Li Y-F., Wen Q., Zhang N-X., Li C. (2018) Pharmacokinetics-based identification of potential therapeutic phthalides from XueBiJing, a Chinese herbal injection used in sepsis management. Drug Metab Dispos 46: 823–834.