Nano dosage forms the drug delivery method of herbal formulation used for improving the efficacy and overwhelming the problems related to plant medicines. Therefore, incorporation of the nano-sized carrier in conventional plant-derived medicine is essential to cure more chronic and lifestyle diseases. Several nano dosage forms like polymeric nanoparticles, liposomes, lipid nanoparticles, nano-emulsion, proliposomes, etc. has great advantages for herbal medicine including bioavailability, enhancement of solubility, improvement of pharmacological activity, protection from toxicity, stability enhancement, sustained delivery, improving the distribution of macrophages, protection from chemical, and physical degradation. The chapter focused on the advantages of nano herbal formulations over traditional herbal formulations.
Top1. Introduction
Nanotechnology is a domain of science that amalgamates different streams of science and technology. The most peculiarity about nanotechnology is, it conducted at the scale, which is nearby 1 to 100nm, hence the name “Nanotechnology”. Nanotechnology is a multifaceted discipline that covers technology and research from the fields of physics, biology, and chemistry. The incredible growth in this emerging field has unlocked new limits for the synthesis, exploration, and utilization of nanoparticles.
The nanoparticles are commonly found in nature because of various events like photochemical and volcanic activities, combustion process, cooking of food, automobile exhausts, and creation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is of prime importance. Metals like gold, silver, platinum, copper, palladium, iron and zinc are used for the fabrication of nanoparticles (Haleemkhan et al., 2015). These nanoparticles have applications in particles in diverse fields. Even though nanoparticles can be produced by using many physicochemical methods, their production using non-toxic and environmentally benevolent biological methods are attractive, especially for application in medicine (Shah et al., 2015). Plants have this uniqueness to reduce the metal ions on their surface and far-flung from the site of ion penetration. Lower organisms like algae, actinomycetes, bacteria, and fungi also possess the potential to produce nanoparticles. A nanoparticle from biological sources reduces environmental impact compared with some of the physicochemical production approaches and be able to use to fabricate enormous amounts of nanoparticles that are devoid of impurity and have a well-defined dimension and morphology (Makarov et al., 2014).
Synthesis of nanoparticles can be achieved mainly by following two approaches either a “top-down” approach or a “bottom-up” approach (Sepeur et al., 2013). In the top-down approach, reduction in dimension from appropriate starting material is accomplished by numerous physical and chemical treatments (Meyers et al., 2006). Irregularities in the outer surface structure and surface chemistry of the nanoparticles is the main drawback of this approach. The dependency of various physical features of nanoparticles on the outer surface structure again imparts limitations on this approach (Thakkar et al., 2010).
On the contrary, the bottom-up approach involves the fabrication of nanoparticles from smaller entities like atoms, molecules, and smaller particles and mostly relies on biological and chemical methods (Mukherjee et al., 2001). In this approach first, the building blocks of the nanoparticles are formed which is then followed by assembling the nano-structure to produce the final particle (Thakkar et al., 2010).