Malaria remains a major cause of death and disability worldwide and is endemic to much of Africa, South America, and southeast Asia. Other malaria risk areas include the Middle east, some countries in Central America and Polynesia, with most other continents virtually free of the disease. The choice between RDTs and microscopy depends on local circumstances, including the skills available, patient case-load, epidemiology of malaria and the possible use of microscopy for the diagnosis of other diseases. Where the case-load of fever patients is high, microscopy is likely to be less expensive than RDTs, but may be less operationally feasible. Microscopy has further advantages in that it can be used for speciation and quantification of parasites, and to assess response to antimalarial treatment. Microscopy can also be used in the identification of other causes of fever. However, a major drawback of light microscopy is its requirement for well-trained, skilled staff and, usually, an energy source to power the microscope.

Information technology provides several databases, data analysis tools, and knowledge extraction techniques in almost every facet of life. In pharmaceutical sciences, several successful attempts are being made under the umbrella of pharmacoinformatics (synonymously referred to as pharmainformatics).Chemoinformatics and bioinformatics contribute directly to drug discovery through virtual screening. Topics like neuroinformatics, immunoinformatics, vaccine informatics, and biosystem informatics contribute indirectly by providing necessary inputs for pharmaceutical design in this area. Topics like metabolomics, toxicoinformatics, and ADME informatics arecontributing to this fi eld by providing information regarding the fate of a NCE/lead in vitro and in vivo conditions.The integration of back - end technologies (for storing and representing chemical structure and chemical libraries) and front - end technologies opportunities in chemoinformatics.

HERBAL medicine is still the mainstay of about 75-80% of the world population, mainly in the developing countries, for primary health care because of better cultural acceptability, better compatibility with the human body and lesser side effects. However, the last few years have seen a major increase in their use in the developed world. In Germany and France, many herbs and herbal extracts are used as prescription drugs and their sales in the countries of European Union were around $ 6 billion in 1991 and may be over $ 20 billion now. In USA, herbal drugs are currently sold in health food stores with a turnover of about $ 4 billion in 1996 which is anticipated to double by the turn of the century1. In India, the herbal drug market is about $ one billion and the export of plant-based crude drugs is around $ 80 million2 . Herbal medicines also find market as nutraceuticals (health foods) whose current market is estimated at about $ 80-250 billion in USA and also in Europe.

Drug research encompasses several diverse disciplines united by a common goal, namely the development of novel therapeutic agents. The search for new drugs can be divided functionally into two stages: discovery and development. The former consists of setting up a working hypothesis of the target enzyme or receptor for a particular disease, establishing suitable models (or surrogate markers) to test biological activities, and screening the new drug molecules for in vitro and/or in vivo biological activities. In the development stage, efforts are focused on evaluation of the toxicity and efficacy of new drug candidates.Recent surveys indicate that the average new chemical entity taken to market in the United States requires 10 to 15 years of research and costs more than $300 million. Once the target enzyme or receptor is identified, medicinal chemists use a variety of empirical and semiempirical structure-activity relationships to modify the chemical structure of a compound to maximize its in vitro activity.

Tablet is the most popular among all dosage forms existing today because of its convenience of self administration, compactness and easy manufacturing; however hand tremors, dysphasia in case of geriatric patients, the underdeveloped muscular and nervous systems in young individuals and h case of uncooperative patients, the problem of swallowing is common phenomenon which leads to poor patient compliance To overcome these drawbacks, mouth dissolving tablets (MDT) or orally disintegrating tablets; (ODT) has emerged as alternative oral dosage forms. These are novel types; of tablets that disintegrate/dissolve/ disperse in saliva within few seconds'. According to European Pharmacopoeia, the ODT should disperse/disintegrate in less than three minutes. The basic approach used in development of MDT is the use of superdisintegrants like Cross linked carboxymelhylcellulose (Croscarmeliose), Sodium starch glycol ate (Primogel, Explotab). Polyvinylpyrrolidone (Polyplasdone) etc. which provide instantaneous disintegration of tablet after putting on tongue, thereby releasing the drug in saliva.

Wound is defined simply as the disruption of the cellular and anatomic continuity of a tissue. Wound may be produced by physical, chemical, thermal, microbial or immunological insult to the tissue. Attention should be directed towards discovering an agent, which will accelerate wound healing either when it is progressing normally, when it is suppressed by various agents like corticosteroids, anti neoplastics.or non- steroidal anti-inflammatory agents. Medical treatment of wound includes administration of drugs either locally (topical) or systemically (oral or parenteral) in an attempt to aid wound repair

Sustained release of macromolecular drugs from polymeric matrices has received increasing attention in recent years. Vaccines that are required to be given in multiple divided doses are not efficacious if only one dose is given without boosting. In order to be effective, most vaccines require two or three booster doses after primary immunization. Therefore, the conversion of multiple dose vaccines into single dose vaccines may represent an important advance. Among the various tentative for improving the administration of proteins, the microencapsulation into biodegradable polymers represents a practical and promising approachControlled drug delivery technology using biodegradable polymers as carriers represents one of the most rapidly advancing area of science.