School of Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing 100102, China.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2013;2013:627375. doi: 10.1155/2013/627375. Epub 2013 Mar 24.
With tens of thousands of plant species on earth, we are endowed with an enormous wealth of medicinal remedies from Mother Nature. Natural products and their derivatives represent more than 50% of all the drugs in modern therapeutics. Because of the low success rate and huge capital investment need, the research and development of conventional drugs are very costly and difficult. Over the past few decades, researchers have focused on drug discovery from herbal medicines or botanical sources, an important group of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy. With a long history of herbal usage for the clinical management of a variety of diseases in indigenous cultures, the success rate of developing a new drug from herbal medicinal preparations should, in theory, be higher than that from chemical synthesis. While the endeavor for drug discovery from herbal medicines is "experience driven," the search for a therapeutically useful synthetic drug, like "looking for a needle in a haystack," is a daunting task. In this paper, we first illustrated various approaches of drug discovery from herbal medicines. Typical examples of successful drug discovery from botanical sources were given. In addition, problems in drug discovery from herbal medicines were described and possible solutions were proposed. The prospect of drug discovery from herbal medicines in the postgenomic era was made with the provision of future directions in this area of drug development.
地球上有成千上万种植物，大自然赋予了我们丰富的药用资源。天然产物及其衍生物占现代治疗药物的 50%以上。由于成功率低和巨额资本投入的需要，传统药物的研发非常昂贵和困难。在过去的几十年中，研究人员专注于从草药或植物资源中发现药物，这是补充和替代医学（CAM）疗法的一个重要组群。在原住民文化中，草药在临床治疗各种疾病方面有着悠久的应用历史，因此从草药制剂中开发新药的成功率应该高于化学合成。虽然从草药中发现药物的努力是“经验驱动”的，但寻找一种具有治疗作用的合成药物，就像“大海捞针”一样，是一项艰巨的任务。在本文中，我们首先阐述了从草药中发现药物的各种方法。给出了从植物来源成功发现药物的典型例子。此外，还描述了从草药中发现药物存在的问题，并提出了可能的解决方案。本文还展望了在后基因组时代从草药中发现药物的前景，并提供了该领域药物开发的未来方向。
