Advance drug delivery and combinational drug approaches for hepatoprotective action of berberine: A progressive overview with underlying mechanism

Objectives Berberine has attracted prominent interest recently due to its wide pharmacological actions in management and treatments of several disease including liver. However, restricted bioavailability and permeability makes this drug as better choice to develop several value added products for improvement of both safety and efficacy. Many of research already conducted in this direction using several approaches to fix this issue. Therefore, current article was designed to summarize all approaches taking together to enhance hepatoprotection by berberine including molecular mechanism. Methods Online scientific databases from PubMed was assessed for collecting information on berberine. All the collected informations were classified and incorporated into different sections such as recent progress of research on advance drug delivery systems and combinational approaches addressing above issue for improvement of hepatoprotective action of berberine. Key finding The electronically PubMed database search yielded 7454 articles from different countries in several languages. Out of them two seventy articles published between 1932 and 2022 were included, corresponding to all detailed overview on berberine including research pertaining on toxicity and safety, biodistribution, pharmacokinetics, biopharmaceutics classification system (BCS), hepatoprotection against various hepatotoxicant agent, advance drug delivery system, combinational drug approaches, clinical Trial for hepatoprotection and patents. The review of the literature reveals that berberine exhibits a potent hepatoprotective action with several molecular action mechanisms. Additionally, current trends of formulation technology for enhancement of hepatoprotective action of berberine in terms of safety and efficacy are well co-related with present work. Conclusion It was well established and concluded from present work that both advance drug delivery system and combinational drug approaches may serve for enhancement of restricted hepatoprotective action of berberine due to poor bioavailability, solubility and permeability. Additionally, berberine based advance delivery system including in combination with bioavailability and permeability enhancer may provide an added advantage in near future to meet the objectives.