Drug candidates from traditional chinese medicines.

Abstract

Good progress has been made to modernize traditional Chinese medicines by obtaining active components from natural herbs. In this review, some recent works on procuring active components and modernizing traditional Chinese medicines will be covered. In addition, some recent works on drug design using modern drug design tools have been described. With some well defined targets, the traditional Chinese medicine databases have been screened so as to identify those compounds for which the potential as a drug candidate was not known before. Among these studies, two have been selected as examples to be discussed in details. First, new anti-HIV candidates have been detected, namely leucovorin and agaritine derivatives. Subsequently, GTS-21 is proved to be a good candidate for Alzheimer's disease. All these findings may provide useful information for finding effective drug candidates with lower cost.

• Authors: Jing-Fang Wang, Dong-Qing Wei, Kuo-Chen Chou
• Journal: Current topics in medicinal chemistry (Curr Top Med Chem) Vol. 8 Issue 18 Pg. 1656-65 ( 2008) ISSN: 1873-4294 [Electronic] United Arab Emirates
• PMID: 19075772 (Publication Type: Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, Review)

Chemical References

• Anti-HIV Agents
• Antimalarials
• Antioxidants
• Drugs, Chinese Herbal
• HIV Protease

Topics

• Amino Acid Sequence
• Anti-HIV Agents (chemistry)
• Antimalarials (chemistry)
• Antioxidants (chemistry)
• Drug Design
• Drugs, Chinese Herbal (chemistry)
• HIV Protease (chemistry, metabolism)
• Medicine, Chinese Traditional
• Models, Molecular
• Molecular Sequence Data
• Sequence Alignment