Contemporary clinical practice, ethnobotanical and traditional evidence and pre-clinical research-alignment, limitations and opportunities

Traditional herbal treatments, substantial part of traditional medicine across all traditional medicine systems, were prepared using whole herb(s) and/or parts of plants and in different forms, including teas, powders, and poultices. While traditional evidence and ethnobotanical research offer an avenue for exploring approaches to disease, they are often misinterpreted and used in a non-traditional, reductionist way to develop new pharmaceuticals and products by creating compound libraries using fractionation approaches with resulting compounds screened in simple pre-clinical biological assays. This bio-fractionation approach ignores the complexity and chemical synergy of medicinal plants and their traditional medicinal use resulting in expensive, lengthy and often ineffective drug development processes and criticism of medicinal plants effectiveness in the applicable disease state. To address alignment between ethnobotanical research, traditional knowledge, contemporary clinical practice and pre-clinical research with the ultimate view of natural product development process that still aligns with the current staged research approach, we have developed a tradition-research nexus framework that considers not just medicinal plant complexity and their use but also extends pre-clinical research into using more complex in vitro models. Current presentation will describe the framework and its implementation into 2 different natural product projects currently underway in our laboratory (cancer and UTI biofilms) and will discuss limitations and opportunities of using this approach – framework flexibility, how do we account for plant complexity and possible synergy, what are intellectual property issues to consider, what are the implications for natural products industry and how does this benefit custodians of the wider botanical knowledge? Publication History Article published online: 05 March 2026 © 2026. Thieme. All rights reserved. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Oswald-Hesse-Straße 50, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany