USING MODERN TECHNOLOGY TO DEVELOP CHINESE HERBAL MEDICINE

 

Shwu-Huey Liu*#, Zaoli Jiang#, Jim Liddil*#, Elizabeth A. Gullen # and Yung-Chi Cheng#.

PhytoCeutica*, Inc.,; Yale University School of Medicine

 

Chinese herbal medicine has been used for thousands of years.  Although millions of people use herbal medicine for either disease treatment or health enhancement, herbal medicines are currently classified as food supplements instead of therapeutic drugs.  The barrier to the use of herbal medicine in mainstream medicine is that there are no quality assurance and no current scientific basis to support the therapeutic claims of herbal medicine including Chinese medicine.  PHY-906, a Chinese herbal formulation, will be used as an example to demonstrate how we will approach herbal medicine with modern technology.  Our interest in this formula is its potential to improve the therapeutic index of current chemotherapeutic drugs for the treatment of cancer by either reducing toxicity or increasing the anticancer activity.  Using animal models, our results indicated that PHY-906 could improve the therapeutic index of several anticancer drugs including CPT-11, 5-FU, VP-16 and L-OddC.  The mechanism of PHY-906 in enhancing these anticancer drugs could be different.  Other Chinese formula with similar claims did not have the same effect as PHY-906.  The consistency of preparations of PHY-906 was also assessed using modern chemical and biological fingerprint technologies.  The results indicated that there was no apparent difference in two individual preparations from the same company.  The pharmacokinetics of the major components of PHY-906 and their impact on pharmacokinetic properties of anticancer drugs as well as the mechanism of PHY-906 action are being explored.  In summary, the utilization of modern technology for the quality control and mechanistic studies should be very helpful in bringing Chinese medicine into the mainstream therapy of the future.

 

 

The Third Symposium on Herbal Medicine: Taking Herbal Medicine into the Global Mainstream Healthcare System in the 21th Century. Taipei, Taiwan, March 13-16, 2000