Pharmacognesy
Modern pharmacognosy incorporates these important new areas into a separate interdisciplinary science. Pharmacognosy's emphasis and focus of study have shifted dramatically from drug identification, such as active constituent isolation, to, more recently, biological activity investigation. Pharmaceutical companies use pharmacognosy to screen, characterise, and produce new drugs for the treatment of human disease. Because naturally occurring drugs are frequently not mass-produced, they must be studied in order to develop synthetic biosimilars. Future developments in pharmacognosy and the herbal drug industry will be heavily reliant on reliable methodologies for identifying marker compounds in extracts, as well as standardisation and quality control of these extracts