Recent trends in preclinical drug-drug interaction studies of flavonoids - Review of case studies, issues and perspectives

Because of health benefits that are manifested across various disease areas, the consumption of herbal products and/or health supplements containing different kinds of flavonoids has been on the rise. While the drug–drug interaction potential between flavonoids and co‐ingested drugs still remain an issue, opportunities exist for the combination of flavonoids with suitable anti‐cancer drugs to enhance the bioavailability of anti‐cancer drugs and thereby reduce the dose size of the anti‐cancer drugs and improve its therapeutic index. In recent years, scores of flavonoids have undergone preclinical investigation with variety of drugs encompassing therapeutic areas such as oncology (etoposide, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, tamoxifen etc.), immunosuppression (cyclosporine) and hypertension (losartan, felodipine, nitrendipine etc.). The review provides examples of the recent trends in the preclinical investigation of 14 flavonoids (morin, quercetin, silibinin, kaempferol etc.) with various co‐administered drugs. The relevance of combination of flavonoids with anti‐cancer drugs and a framework to help design the in vitro and in vivo preclinical studies to gain better mechanistic insights are discussed. Also, concise discussions on the various physiological factors that contribute for the reduced bioavailability of flavonoids along with the significant challenges in the data interpretation are provided. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.