Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 31, Issue 28, 2025

Healthcare is rapidly leveraging machine learning to enhance patient care, streamline operations, and address complex medical issues. Though ethical issues, model efficiency, and algorithmic bias exist, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted its usefulness in disease outbreak prediction and treatment optimization.

This article aims to discuss machine learning applications, benefits, and the ethical and practical challenges in healthcare.

Machine learning assists in diagnosis, patient monitoring, and epidemic prediction but faces challenges like algorithmic bias and data quality. Overcoming these requires high-quality data, impartial algorithms, and model monitoring.

Machine learning might revolutionize healthcare by making it more efficient and better for patients. Full acceptance and the advancement of technologies to improve health outcomes on a global scale depend on resolving ethical, practical, and technological concerns.

Random use of natural herbal products affects the treatment of diseases. In this review, the limitations may be encountered in using natural substances of plant origin and the studies on using these substances in treating cancer, cognitive disorders, heart diseases, diabetes, and microbial diseases are examined and summarized.

People worldwide use herbal products derived from natural plants to solve health problems. It is known that random use of herbal products can negatively affect the treatment. However, people need help with the formulation or use of natural substances. There is no new disease-modifying herbal therapy available to treat diseases such as cancer, microbial disorders, diabetes, cognitive disorders, and cardiac disorders.

This review aims to report the difficulties encountered in formulating and using natural herbal substances and highlight their possible use in some diseases.

Available information about the study was collected through many search engines such as Science Direct, PubMed, and Google Scholar.

Working with natural herbal substances worldwide presents many difficulties, especially a lack of knowledge, modern technological devices, or clinical studies. According to currently available studies, some natural herbal substances are effective against cancer, microbial disorders, diabetes, cognitive disorders, and heart disorders.

Deepening the studies would be benefical in eliminating the difficulties related to natural herbal medicines and making them more reliable. More research is needed to include these substances in the protocol and use them in treating diseases.

To enhance curcumin's bioavailability with the help of carbon dot and piperine, due to its promising anticancer activity.

Cancer is a disease condition, where some cells grow uncontrollably, and if not controlled, they spread to other parts of the body. Concerning anticancer agents, curcumin has anticancer properties along with anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and antioxidant. Here in this study, the pharmacokinetic property was improved with the help of Carbon Dot encapsulation.

Bamboo leaves were used for the preparation of CDs and curcumin was loaded in them and the characterization for particle size, morphology, loading capacity, quantum yield, drug release in vitro studies, and in vitro cell viability activity as anticancer activity was done accordingly.

Prepared CDs have a smaller particle size (< 10 nm), good loading capacity, stability, and excellent fluorescence activity. Studies on the release of curcumin have shown that a pH-5.5 solution leads to enhanced curcumin release. The CDs-curcumin shows enhanced toxicity against cancerous cells than the curcumin even at lower concentrations (20, 40, 60, 80, 100 µM).

Curcumin can be delivered by CDs, which have the advantages of increased bioavailability, small size, high loading capacity, improved photoluminescence, and biocompatibility. These characteristics can result in improved anticancer activities even at low concentrations.

Atrophic vaginitis (AV) is a common and frequently occurring disease, lacking effective curative measures. Exploring the mechanism of vaginal mucosal homeostasis from the perspective of metabolites has great research prospects.

We compared the metabolic profiles of vaginal secretions between AV patients and healthy individuals via liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). We further explored effective and sensitive metabolites and metabolic pathways for senile vaginitis through bioinformatics analysis and experimental verification. Through untargeted metabolomics analysis, we screened 561 differential metabolites in two groups of vaginal secretion samples. These differential metabolites were mainly concentrated in fatty acids/carboxylic acids, glycerophospholipids, organic oxides, steroids, and their derivatives. They were mainly enriched in purine metabolism, diabetic cardiomyopathy generation, and choline metabolism pathways.

The receiver operating characteristic analysis showed the metabolites (e.g., guggulsterone, umbelliprenin, and inosinic acid) to have good discrimination ability for the AV group. In addition, we also explored the potential mechanism of action of umbelliprenin at the cellular level.

This study is expected to provide a new perspective for understanding the relationship between metabolites and the pathogenesis of AV.