Trinity College, Dublin, School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, East End Development 4/5, Dublin 2, Ireland.
J Ethnopharmacol. 2012 Apr 10;140(3):482-91. doi: 10.1016/j.jep.2012.01.050. Epub 2012 Feb 7.
A vast majority Chinese herbal medicines (CHM) are traditionally administered as individually prepared water decoctions (tang) which are rather complicated in practice and their dry extracts show technological problems that hamper straight production of more convenient application forms. Modernised extraction procedures may overcome these difficulties but there is lack of clinical evidence supporting their therapeutic equivalence to traditional decoctions and their quality can often not solely be attributed to the single marker compounds that are usually used for chemical extract optimisation. As demonstrated by the example of the rather simple traditional TCM formula Danggui Buxue Tang, both the chemical composition and the biological activity of extracts resulting from traditional water decoction are influenced by details of the extraction procedure and especially involve pharmacokinetic synergism based on co-extraction. Hence, a more detailed knowledge about the traditional extracts' chemical profiles and their impact on biological activity is desirable in order to allow the development of modernised extracts that factually contain the whole range of compounds relevant for the efficacy of the traditional application. We propose that these compounds can be identified by metabolomics based on comprehensive fingerprint analysis of different extracts with known biological activity. TCM offers a huge variety of traditional products of the same botanical origin but with distinct therapeutic properties, like differentially processed drugs and special daodi qualities. Through this variety, TCM gives an ideal field for the application of metabolomic techniques aiming at the identification of active constituents.
绝大多数中草药（CHM）传统上作为单独制备的水煎剂（tang）给药，在实践中相当复杂，其干提取物存在技术问题，阻碍了更方便应用形式的直接生产。现代化的提取程序可以克服这些困难，但缺乏临床证据支持它们与传统汤剂的治疗等效性，而且其质量往往不能仅仅归因于通常用于化学提取优化的单一标记化合物。以相对简单的传统中药配方当归补血汤为例，无论是来自传统水煎剂的提取物的化学成分还是生物活性，都受到提取程序细节的影响，特别是涉及基于共同提取的药代动力学协同作用。因此，为了开发实际上包含与传统应用疗效相关的所有化合物范围的现代化提取物，需要更详细地了解传统提取物的化学成分及其对生物活性的影响。我们建议可以通过基于不同具有已知生物活性的提取物的综合指纹分析的代谢组学来识别这些化合物。中医药提供了大量相同植物来源的传统产品，但具有不同的治疗特性，如不同加工的药物和特殊的道地品质。通过这种多样性，中医药为应用代谢组学技术以识别活性成分提供了理想的领域。
