A Novel Herbal Informatic Approach for the Management of Skin Burn Injury

Skin burn injury is a prominent unintended injury that results in lifelong physical and mental scarring, causing pain and subsequent mortality. Notwithstanding a considerable decrease in their incidence, burn injuries remain as one of the most common forms of trauma and also account for affecting the mental health, quality of life all around the globe. Burn injuries can be managed using chemotherapeutic modalities and have always been the domain of burn consultants. According to the WHO (world health organization), approximately 1,80,000 deaths occur every year that are caused by burns, and the vast majority occur in countries with low and middleincome. This incidence is higher due to illiteracy, poverty, and lack of safety awareness. Despite the availability of numerous therapeutic moieties and ointments available commercially, people are more converging on the herbals remedies due to their holistic approach and less toxic effects. In this book chapter, we are focusing on the novel Herbal Informatic model for the identification of ethnopharmacologically based predominant phytoconstituents or Nano-phytomedicines (NPs) for the management of skin burn injury. This model was pre-validated by Tanwar et al., on several disease models such as Autoimmune disorders like Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), Gout; Metabolic disorders like Diabetes, and several Nosocomial infections such as Salmonella, E. coli, Clostridium species, etc. This novel tool involves the rationalebased selection of herbals that could be an integrated ‘Herbal Informatics’ approach employing the use of both ethnopharmacological/traditional knowledge from the Ayurvedic Medicinal System (AMS) and in silico bio-informatics search tools. This combinatorial approach serves to retrieve information about a plant and reveals their phytoconstituents based on medicinal properties for targeting virulence factors/biomarkers involved in the progression of burn injury. In this chapter, we are emphasizing the 5-major steps that are involved in scrutinizing the robust druggable natural compounds that could be utilized to develop Nano-phytomedicines (NPs) for the management of skin burn injury or burn sepsis and can also be effective in the drug discovery process followed by study at in vitro and in vivo level.