Biotechnology to Support Chinese Herbs' Medicinal Claims

The use of herbal medicines, also dubbed as traditional medicine, represents around 40% of the Chinese pharmaceutical market, generating an annual sales of about  US$ 21 billion. It is also big in other Asian countries where up to 80% of some populations use it for health care, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). However, it is less accepted elsewhere, partly because of the lack of an evidence base as well as concerns about quality.

But an article in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization reports that Chinese researchers tap biotechnology  to improve its drug quality standards and to convince the international research community that traditional Chinese medicine has a solid evidential basis. The Chinese traditional medicine-based research and development, funded by the National Institute of Health of the United States of America, will try to increase the prospects of obtaining biologically active hits to specific diseases, representing a tremendous advantage to drug discovery and development.

For more information, visit http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/90/8/12-020812/en/.