Projects Profile
Project Title
Comprehensive Database of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Partnership
Prof. Peter Hylands/ Dr David J Barlow from King's College London
Prof. Weiliang Zhu from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Project Aim
Research carried out at King’s and the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM) has supported development of a prototype database of Chinese plants and their use in TCM, together with chemical data and predicted biological activities of their constituents.
This project will draw on the research expertise from both King’s and the Shanghai Institute of Material Medica (SIMM) and will transform the database from its current state with an aim to produce a licensable version of a database that is accessible, user-friendly and has the functionality required by industry or academic end users.
Inspiration for the projects
Due to variety of reasons including the multiple names used in each of certain TCM herbs, the large quantities of relevant Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) information being published consist many unwitting repetition and confusions. With the increase of the emerging new publications, there is now an urgent need to properly organise such TCM information and to tidy up and to clarify the confusions in order that such TCM information can be properly applied to the TCM community and the pharmaceutical industry.
Also, western medicine is starting to incorporate TCM approaches. The size and growth potential of this market is significant with, in 2006, recorded sales of US$14.73b; However several factors restrict its growth, notably the regulatory environment in Western countries. With increasing global regulatory demands to identify active components with corresponding data supporting safety and efficacy, a database that enables developers to obtain and utilize information relating to chemical and biological properties of plant-derived compounds will drive the growth of the TCM sector.
Existing technologies that address the market include databases from NeoTrident, CambridgeSoft and CHMIS-C. However these products do not provide information on predicted biological activities of TCM constituents, nor do they offer such a comprehensive chemical coverage of the most widely used herbs.
Innovation Elements
This novel combination of SIMM’s knowledge of TCM compounds and King’s understanding of the needs of Western users is the key innovation which will enable development of a valuable research tool for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, academic researchers, and the medical profession (including the complementary health sector).
Work to date has shown the potential of combining the novel databases with cheminformatic and molecular modeling techniques to provide a commercially valuable tool for development of TCM products.
Commercial Potential and Further Development
The outcome of the project will form the basis for a novel database that can be licensed to users because it:
- incorporates functionalities (eg, structural information, molecular targets for compounds, predicted target affinities for compounds) that offer significant added value to developers of TCM products, and
- has levels of accessibility and user friendliness that enable its routine incorporation into development work.
The databases developed at King’s will contribute significantly to the library of information available – enabling data mining and molecular modeling to further drug discovery.
This research has already attracted some industry interests. Several enquiries have been received from major pharmaceutical companies and from database companies indicating an interest in the database.
