Method of discovery of effective components in herbals based on evidence by reversed-directed analysis
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Clinical Trials, Drugs and Devices
- Keywords
- Effective compound, Clinical trial, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Herbals, TCM
- Copyright
- © 2016 Zhang
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Method of discovery of effective components in herbals based on evidence by reversed-directed analysis. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1902v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1902v1
Abstract
Conventional methods in this field include identifying and screening compounds in a laboratory setting with cells and animals, and then moving on to clinical trials with promising compounds. To complicate the issue with these methods, effective compounds might not exist in the original herbals, multiple components might be involved with outcomes, long study period and high cost. The method described above might bypass bottlenecks such as, 1) promising compounds are identified from test patients who demonstrate preferred and safe results, 2) more than one compound might be identified, 3) safe and effective compounds might be metabolites and not exist in herbals. The process includes a website to collect clinical information. The promising compounds can be determined by analyzing common components from patients. Both internal and external tests could be done with promising compounds, the entire process would be very efficient and economical.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.