Ancient Herbs with Modern Promise?

Do traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) actually work? Scientific proof is often sorely lacking.  Nevertheless, even if a medical practice is unproven, the potential for truth is worth investigating. Enter a new collaboration between Elsevier and Beijing University of Chinese Medicine (BUCM), looking at whether TCM represents a rich source of material for further study by mainstream medicine (1).

There is some precedent for seemingly strange and ancient practices proving to be more effective than scientists might expect; for example, an Anglo-Saxon antibiotic recipe calls for bile from a cow’s gall bladder – and it’s surprisingly effective at killing bacteria (2). And TCM does have some links to modern medicine: “A great example is artemisinin, an active ingredient from the Chinese herb Qing Hao. It was traditionally used for treating fever, but later was developed as an anti-malarial drug,” says Jianping Liu, Professor and director of Evidence-Based Chinese Medicine at BUCM. “The Nobel Prize was awarded for this success to the Chinese scholar Tu Youyou in 2015. Artemisinin has saved millions of lives and is one of the most significant contributions of China and TCM to improving global health.”

With traditional remedies, it can be difficult to separate effective ingredients from superstitions, so the Elsevier/BUCM effort will aim to create a new taxonomy to consolidate and expand on existing TCM knowledge in Embase, Elsevier’s biomedical database. “BUCM, along with Elsevier, is not promoting TCM – but collaborating to share information and create taxonomies that could assist researchers, and lead to better health in the 21st century,” says Ivan Krstic, Senior Product Development Manager of Embase at Elsevier.

According to Krstic, some of the largest pharma companies are already interested in exploring how TCM can aid drug discovery and the development of new therapies. “Our collaboration aims to make existing research around TCM more discoverable, allowing drug researchers to seek knowledge from traditional clinical practices for modern biomedical sciences,” he adds.