Green Alternatives in Treatment of Liver Diseases: the Challenges of Traditional Medicine and Green Nanomedicine

Abstract

Liver diseases have become a global problem with approximately 2 million deaths per year. The high increase in the mortality rate of these diseases is mostly related to the limitations in the understanding of the evolutionary clinical cases of liver diseases, the low delivery of drugs in the liver, the non‐specific administration of drugs and the side effects generated at the systemic level by conventional therapeutic agents. Today it's common knowledge that phytochemicals have a high curative potential, even in the prevention and/or reversibility of liver disorders; however, even using these green molecules, researchers continue to deal whit the same challenges implemented with conventional therapeutic agents, which limits the pharmacological potential of these friendly molecules. The latest advances in nanotechnology have proven that the use of nanocarriers as a delivery system for green active ingredients, as well as conventional ones, increases the pharmacological potential, due to their physicochemical characteristics (size, Zeta potential, etc. ) moldable depending on the therapeutic objective; in addition, it should be noted that in recent years, nanoparticles have been developed for the specific delivery of drugs towards a specific target (stellar cells, hepatocytes, Kupffer cells), depending on the patient's clinical state of the disease.