Challenges and Prospects of Development of Herbal Biomaterial Based Ethical Wound Care Products—A Scoping Review

Abstract

Total wound care is an unmet therapeutic need considering the morbidity and mortality associated with the rising prevalence of nonhealing/chronic wounds. Current wound management fails to address all aspects/types of wounds despite the availability of scores of traditional and modern, investigational products. Traditional medicine drugs of wound healing repute validated to target multiple biological pathways and key events in the mammalian wound healing cascade, reportedly affecting wound healing phases. Advances in the development of biocomposite matrices and their analytical characterization warrant a relook at consolidating time-tested wound healing properties of herbal bioactives for prospective development as ethical wound care products. Aside from the bottlenecks of their multiconstituent profiling and clinical trial data generation, regulatory hurdles also cloister any systematic attempts at their re-engineering into clinical deliverables. In the context of national policy changes to bring in totally indigenous solutions, countries with a huge knowledge/material resource on wound healing bioactives need to essentially facilitate the same.