Chinese herbs offer hope to fight disease
The first large-scale screening of herbs commonly used in traditional Chinese medicine reveals they contain thousands of compounds with the potential to fight diseases from cancer to HIV-AIDS and conditions such as erectile dysfunction and high blood pressure.
The compounds are promising ‘candidates’ for new drugs, pharmaceutical chemist David Barlow and his colleagues at King’s College London claim. Dr Barlow’s group discovered 8,264 chemical compounds in the 240 plants studied. Sixty two percent of them contained at least one potential disease-fighting biochemical, with 53% containing two or more. Some herbs, such as maidenhair and skullcap, had five or more active ingredients.
The team will report in an upcoming edition of the ‘American Chemical Society’s Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling’ that it found almost 2,600 compounds that could be used to fight a host of ailments. Among them were pain, inflammation, dementia, obesity, Huntington’s disease, blood clots, depression, eye disease and arthritis.
