Herbal & Traditional Medicine

Biography

Biography: Chrisna Gouws

Abstract

Traditional herbal medicine remains popular, and the African continent has a rich biodiversity and accessibility to diverse medicinal plants. Although many benefits have been derived from the use of herbal medicines, many concerns are associated with their use. This includes unknown transport characteristics, unknown toxicity levels and potential herb-drug interactions which have been identified to have a rising impact on patient treatment outcomes. Traditional African medicines can modify pharmacokinetics properties of co-administered drugs, while frequently used herbal medicines have proven to be toxic. However, literature to this regard is limited and often contradictory, highlighting the need for more research. In vitro pharmaceutical and biological evaluations are traditionally performed in two-dimensional (2D) mammalian cell cultures. These models have extensive shortcomings and reduced physiological relevance, resulting in an international effort to move to more advanced cell culture models for biomedical research. Such advanced cell models vary from more complex growth support to advanced three dimensional (3D) cultures. 3D cell culture systems have been proposed as an alternative to mimic in vivo conditions more closely, and these complex and advanced models have numerous applications in basic research, but also in applied research such as drug development, cancer research and toxicity studies. Cells grown as active 3D spheroid cultures ensure higher physiological relevance of experiments, and are essential to reduce the discrepancies between in vitro data and case studies. This requires different advanced cell culture models for each research question, and can range from dynamic three-dimensional spheroid cultures to air-liquid interface models.