Phillyrin is an effective lignan glycoside extracted from a traditional Chinese medicine Forsythia suspensa (Thunb.) Vahl (Oleaceae). It mainly exists in the roots, stems, leaves and fruits of the plant, with the highest content in the leaves. In terms of its medicinal application, there are a large number of experimental data proving its pharmacological effects in vitro and in animal models, such as anti-inflammatory, anti-obesity, anti-tumor, etc. Furthermore, pharmacokinetic experiments have also shown phillyrin’s high effectiveness and low toxicity. Despite more than one thousand studies in the literature on phillyrin retrievable from Web of Science, PubMed, and CNKI, few reviews on its pharmacological activities have been presented conclusively. In this paper, we aimed to summarize the pharmacological and pharmacokinetic characteristics of phillyrin from the current literature, focusing on its anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, antiviral, antibacterial, hepatoprotective and anti-cancer effects, hoping to come up with new insights for its application as well as future studies.

An easy, quick, and sensitive approach adopting ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) equipped with diode array detector was used to analyze and systematically evaluate the quality of Pudilan tablets manufactured by 12 distinct pharmaceutical companies. In this research, 15 peaks were chosen as the common peaks to assess the similarities for different batches (S1–S43) of Pudilan tablet samples. In comparison with the control fingerprint, similarity values for 43 batches of samples exceeded 0.922. In addition, by analyzing the reference substances of epigoitrin, caffeic acid, chlorogenic acid, acetylcorynoline, baicalin and baicanshialein, the chromatogram of the 6 reference substances was established. The recoveries for the reference substances which demonstrated good regression in the linear range (r 2 > 0.999) were in the range of 98.3–101.1%. The results demonstrated that the established method was highly accurate, efficient and reliable. This study provides a valid, dependable and pragmatic method to evaluate the quality of Pudilan tablet.