Review on herbal drug formulation and standardization

Herbal formulations contain an active herbal substance in combination with one or more herbal preparations. Herbal formulation are obtained by subjecting herbal substances to treatment such as extraction, distillation, expression, fractionation, purification, concentration. These are the preparations being prepared with the use of modern methods by using powder form of herbal drugs and its derived products. Quality standardization of herbal preparation is a fundamental requirement of herbal drugs industry dealing with Ayurvedic and herbal products. Nowadays newer and advanced methods are available for the standardization of herbal drugs like the combination of chromatographic and spectrophotometric methods, biological assays, use of biomarkers in fingerprinting etc. Bioassay can play an important role in the standardization of herbal drugs and can also become an important quality control method as well as for proper stability testing of the product. There is great need to improve quality standards of herbal formulations as its increasing demand by the peoples. In this review the study of various methods of conventional standardization of herbal drugs stated with the recent approaches of standardization methods. By that way we can explore in future the use of herbal drug preparation with its promising quality standards.