Herbal Medicine for Health Management and Disease Prevention

Herbal remedies have been developed and used since the dawn of human civilization. Herbal medicines preponderantly deal with the medicinal application of a broad spectrum of plant regimes for health management and disease prevention. Wider varieties of algae, fungus, and lichen exudates have also been considered for herbal medicine using traditional methods such as infusion, decoction, maceration, distillation, expression, fractionation, and purification. However, conventional channels are insufficiently successful to generate significant demand for industrial-scale manufacture of herbal medicines. Systems synthetic biology and metabolic engineering have proved important in boosting productivity and cutting costs in the production of herbal drugs in this area. Additionally, there are regulatory and bioethical problems for health management and illness prevention at the current state of the art that make it difficult to mass-produce herbal medications. Based on this current scenario, current chapter deals with general outline on herbal medicines; its impact on health management and disease prevention; impact of system synthetic biology and metabolic engineering to accelerate herbal medicine development; and brief outline on regulatory-bioethical aspects upon usage of herbal medicine for health management and disease control.