Molecular Mechanisms of Traditional Medicines: Ethnopharmacological Evidence for Safe Integration with Conventional Care

For most of human history, traditional medicines — plant-, fungal-, and mineral-derived preparations rooted in long-standing healing systems were the principal tools of healthcare. They remain so for much of the world: the World Health Organization estimates that around 80% of the global population still uses traditional and complementary medicine in primary care, and traditional medicine is formally embedded in the health systems of more than 100 countries (WHO Global Report on Traditional and Complementary Medicine, 2019).Patients with cancer, chronic inflammatory disease, metabolic disorders, and neurodegenerative conditions increasingly combine traditional remedies with conventional therapy. This places a growing responsibility on ethnopharmacology to generate the mechanistic, pharmacokinetic, and safety evidence clinicians and regulators need — not to pass judgement on tradition, but to understand what is acting, how, and under what conditions it can be safely co-administered.A key priority for the field is the chemical complexity of traditional medicine preparations. As multi-component systems whose composition depends on species identity, provenance, harvest, processing, and storage, transparent characterisation is essential: without it, mechanistic findings remain difficult to reproduce or build upon. This Research Topic directly addresses that priority, bringing together work that sets a higher bar for preparation characterisation as a foundation for meaningful mechanistic insight.We invite original research, systematic reviews, and methods papers that deliver mechanism-focused, ethnopharmacologically grounded evidence on traditional medicines, with particular interest in:Molecular pharmacology of traditional medicine preparations: signal transduction, receptor and transporter interactions, epigenetic modulation, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, antimicrobial, metabolic, and anti-tumour mechanisms, assessed in well-characterised model systems.Multi-omic and network pharmacology approaches: metabolomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and computational target deconvolution used to dissect the multi-target activity of complex extracts and formulations. Wet-lab confirmation is required to complement computational findings, in line with section policy.Pharmacokinetics, bioavailability, and herb-drug interactions: ADME, CYP/transporter modulation, and PK/PD characterisation directly relevant to co-administration with conventional treatments.Active constituents and standardisation: isolation, structural elucidation, and bioactivity-guided fractionation of compounds responsible for observed effects, linked back to the whole preparation.Translational and clinical ethnopharmacology: well-designed clinical, pharmacovigilance, ethnobotanical field, and bedside-to-bench studies connecting documented traditional use to measurable patient outcomes, with priority for high-unmet-need areas including oncology, neurology, metabolic disease, chronic pain, and antimicrobial resistance.To ensure the quality and relevance of submissions, all manuscripts should be grounded in a clear ethnopharmacological rationale and include transparent characterisation of the test material. All submissions must adhere to the Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (Heinrich et al., 2020, J. Ethnopharmacol. 246:112230): http://www.frontiersin.org/files/pdf/4_pillars_FULL_TEXT.pdfAuthors are asked to consult the ConPhyMP tool and include the completed checklist as supplementary material (Heinrich et al., 2022, Front. Pharmacol. 13:953205): https://ga-online.org/best-practice https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.953205By bringing rigorous mechanistic work together under a shared reporting framework, this Research Topic aims to build a reusable evidence base for clinicians, formulators, and regulators, and to support the next generation of ethnopharmacologists working at the interface of traditional knowledge and modern biomedicine. Topic editors: Eisuke Kato, Jitpisute Chunthorng-Orn, Lini Huo Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82363/molecular-mechanisms-of-traditional-medicines-ethnopharmacological-evidence-for-safe-integration-with-conventional-care