Screening of enzyme inhibitors from traditional Chinese medicine

Comb Chem High Throughput Screen. 2010 Dec;13(10):885-99. doi: 10.2174/138620710793360239.

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been used for more than 4000 years. By comparison with large combinatorial chemistry libraries and natural products of the West for high-throughput screening (HTS) of new drugs discovery, an advantage of TCM is that the preparation has clear efficacies on the therapy of some diseases. Although the effective components are not clear, the clear efficacies of TCM have been identified for long time practice, Therefore, TCMs should be valuable lead compound libraries with a definite therapy efficacy from the viewpoint of HTS. Nevertheless, current HTS technologies are not easily adapted to investigate TCMs because they are designed for screening a relatively pure known chemical at a known concentration. In contrast, TCMs are mixtures of unknown compounds in unknown concentrations that may differ markedly between samples from different plants. This article reviews the current and future researches on the enzyme inhibitors screening from TCM.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Review

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Drug Evaluation, Preclinical / methods*
  • Drugs, Chinese Herbal / chemistry*
  • Drugs, Chinese Herbal / pharmacology*
  • Enzyme Inhibitors / chemistry*
  • Enzyme Inhibitors / pharmacology*
  • High-Throughput Screening Assays / methods*
  • Humans
  • Medicine, Chinese Traditional* / methods
  • Plants, Medicinal / chemistry

Substances

  • Drugs, Chinese Herbal
  • Enzyme Inhibitors