Western Healers In Traditional Chinese Medicine And Implications For Finding Combinatorial Drugs

Considering the fact that the plant distribution patterns in China and other regions of the world are rather similar and Western drugs including many natural medicine information, we speculate that although Western drugs and traditional Chinese remedies origined from different herbs to treat the same conditions, but their activity components in structure is perhaps the same or similar, this information not proved traditional Chinese medicine have good effection, most importantly , it can guide the design of new combinatorial drugs.To verify this speculation, we employed chemoinformatic methods to make a global structural comparison between～10,000 traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) components (recorded in traditional Chinese Medicine Database (TCMD)) and～8,000 modern Western drugs (recorded in Comprehensive Medicinal Chemistry (CMC) database), which revealed that 908 agent pairs are structurally similar (with similarity≥0.85). Among them, 327 agent pairs are identical in structures. Furthermore, a comparison between～10,000 TCM components and～145,000 drug candidates (recorded in MDL Drug Data Report (MDDR) database) identified 1,054 pairs of structurally similar agents (with similarity≥0.85). Among them, 146 agent pairs are identical in structures. It is interesting to note that a certain part of CMC counterparts of TCMD agents recorded in ancient Chinese medicinal book for more than 1500 years.Secondly through comparing the herbal usage of ancient medicinal systems of different nations, we noticed that some similar herbs have been independently discovered and utilized to treat similar diseases by different cultures at herbal medicine level. At molecular level although different folks used distinct herbs to treat the same conditions, similar effective agents are responsible, at least in part, for these herbal effects. Since there was little medicinal communication between China and foreign countries 2000 years ago, we think that the existence of similar herbs and/or components in very ancient Chinese and Western medicines can be best explained as a convergent evolution in both medicinal systems.Thirdly, we compared chemical space with the components contained in traditional medicines and natural products and taked some traditional Chinese formulae example, discussed western healers in traditional Chinese medicine of implications for finding Western drug combinations.This research not deepen understand evolvement between two medicinal systems, improve the reliability for traditional Chinese medicine in science point of view, but the result can apply to synergistic combined drugs, and guide the discovery of new combined drugs.