Drug discovery from Chinese medicines: what's new in next?

Abstract

Chinese medicine has its own science and art. To understand Chinese medicine on scientific basis and to push Chinese medicine has become a part of world medical system. Bioscience and OMICS technologies are powerful approaches in Chinese medicine research. In the past years, drug discovery from Chinese medicines have been acknowledged worldwide, such as artemisinin for antimalarial and arsenic trioxide for treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia. Actually, as a complementary and alternative medicine, Chinese medicine rarely uses single pure compound or single herb, instead, it always uses blend of several herbs (composite formulae, or Fufang in Chinese) to treat diseases. One of the unique advantages in Chinese medicine is that it can use known Chinese medicinal herbs to create new composite formulae for new diseases such as SARS, new type influenza and other chronic diseases. Facing complicated diseases, Western medicine have been also using combination therapy in modern medical practice, such as “cocktail therapy” for AIDS, combination chemotherapy for cancer. Identification of natural origin, quality control, gut bacteria metabolite, pharmacological effects, molecular targets and clinical trial which are caried out on international platform should be emphasized. Some successful cases will be used as paradigms to illustrate this approach on study of Chinese medicines in in vitro and in vivo, in this presentation.