Mechanism of natural products and traditional Chinese medicinal plants

Chinese medicinal plants (CMP) have diverse therapeutic function and in many cases have relatively low side effect. CMP have been widely used by ethnic Chinese and others worldwide, and are recognized as valuable alternative to western internal medicine. While much progress has been made in probing and analysing bioactive ingredients of CMP, effort to commercialize them and to design new drugs based on the functional mechanism of CMP has been hindered because of a lack of knowledge of the protein targets of most CMP.
 
We have developed a new method and application software for finding protein targets of a drug, drug lead or natural product. We are using this new tool to probe the mechanism of selected active compounds from CMP. Below is an example of the compounds that we have studied. More detailed information can be found here.

Statistics of Identified Anticancer- Implicating Protein Targets of Anticancer Chinese Natural Products

Chinese  Natural Product Compound	Number of Identified Anticancer Targets	Number Confirmed or Implicated by experiment
Acronycine	12	3
Allicin	15	2
Baicalin	17	3
Catechin	16	3
Emodin	9	4