Challenges and Opportunities for Improving the Safety Assessment of Botanical Dietary Supplements: A United States Pharmacopeia Perspective

The United States Pharmacopeia (USP) is an independent, nonprofit, science-based organization whose mission is to improve global health through public quality standards for dietary supplements, medicines, and food ingredients.(1) Before developing standards for dietary supplement ingredients, the USP performs an Admission Evaluation (Figure 1), which includes an assessment to ascertain that an ingredient does not present a serious health risk.(2) This article discusses the challenges encountered during the evaluation of botanicals and proposes possible solutions.