DAAN Chinese Herbs and Acupuncture

Researchers in London have created a database of Chinese herbs’ active ingredients and possible use for certain diseases:

“A group of researchers at King’s College London decided to use a computer screening to construct a single database both to catalogue the chemical makeup of 240 species of herb and to indicate which target enzymes and receptors implicated in diseases—such as HIV/AIDS, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease—those components may be able to regulate.

“The motivation for the cataloguing and the provision of tools for the data mining is really to provide a way for perhaps not the herbs themselves, but the purified constituents [that] might be discovered as new therapeutics of this disease or that disease,” says King’s College pharmacologist David Barlow, who credits the study’s co-author, PhD student Thomas Ehrman, with the idea.

Barlow’s group used a screening algorithm called Random Forest, which is a type of decision tree, to compile its database. The algorithm involves each entity being screened with a random set of questions—in this case, mostly about the herb’s constituents—to tease out which of the biological targets it could possibly effect. “If you take a set of 8,000-plus constituents from herbs and get their chemical details and feed them through the system, you essentially classify them one by one and say, ‘This one has a fingerprint appropriate for this target and, therefore, may have this use,’” Barlow explains.

The targets the researchers chose fell into five categories: cell signal regulators, implicated in cancer, asthma and depression; nitrous oxide overproduction or overexpression, which is associated with the hardening of arteries and inflammation as well as Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s diseases; cyclooxygenase and lipooxygenase, two targets of anti-inflammatory agents that are tied to Alzheimer’s, cancer and arthritis; aldose reductase, an enzyme responsible for complications from diabetes, such as eye disorders; and the viral enzymes HIV-1 integrase, protease and reverse transcriptase, all implicated in catalyzing the HIV virus’s life cycle. Of the 240 herbs sampled, 62 percent of them were found to have constituents that could be useful in treating one of these targets. Fifty-three percent of the plants may be able to tackle more than one disease. ”

Tags: Herbs //