Advances in Combination Therapy for Chronic Diseases: Bridging Conventional and Natural Products for Enhanced Outcomes

Dear Colleagues,

Chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, arthritis, and neurodegenerative disorders, pose significant global health challenges due to their prolonged nature and the complexity of their underlying mechanisms, including chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, and immune dysregulation. While conventional pharmaceutical therapies play a crucial role in managing these conditions, long-term use often leads to side effects, drug resistance, and incomplete treatment efficacy.

This Special Issue will explore the growing interest in combination therapy, including the integration of natural products (i.e., crude herbal medicine or isolated/purified natural products) and natural products with conventional drugs, to enhance therapeutic outcomes, reduce adverse effects, and offer a more holistic approach to chronic disease management. This Special Issue will highlight innovative research, clinical trials, and mechanistic studies that examine the enhanced (i.e., synergistic, additive) effects of natural products and drug–natural product combinations, their molecular targets, and the potential for personalized medicine.

Key Themes:

• Mechanistic insights into combined natural products or natural products with conventional drugs bring more beneficial effects in terms of targeting chronic diseases;
• The role of combination therapy in preventing drug resistance or minimizing side effects with mechanistic insights;
• Molecular pathways targeted by natural products in combination and drug-natural products combinations in metabolic, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative diseases;
• Challenges in standardizing natural products for combination therapy;
• The future of personalized combination therapies for chronic diseases.

A minimum of two methods below are required.

• Structural elucidation of the mixture components by MS, LC–MS, NMR;
• Composition ratio of each component (HPLC, LC–MS, or other chromatography techniques);
• Focus on robust interaction method development and validation (in the case of a methodology article, mechanistic studies are not necessary).

Dr. Xian (Phoebe) Zhou
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Biomedicines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• combination therapy
• interaction
• chronic diseases
• synergy
• molecular pathways
• mathematical methods
• minimizing side effects