subject: Research and Development of Natural Drugs [print this page] Research and Development of Natural Drugs
Natural drugs are natural products with pharmacological activity existing in the nature such as animals, plants, minerals, and so on. Natural drug is not the same thing as traditional Chinese medicine or Chinese medicinal herb. With the development of society, people pay more attention to negative effect brought by chemical drugs on human health and living environment; backing to nature and protecting environment have become a tide of thought to deal with the relations between human and environment. Research and development of natural drugs including plant medicine, animal medicine and marine drug take advantage of this opportunity to vigorously develop. Various factitious controls over natural drugs tend to loose.
So far, in the use of natural drugs around the world, application therapies that have already formed include Chinese Medicine, Indian Buddhist Medicine, Islamic Medicine, European traditional herbal medicine, South American national medicine and African National Medicine. Among them, Chinese Medicine is thought to be the most developed natural drug system in the world today. From the scale of the use of natural drugs, total number of the kinds of natural drugs of China has reached 12,772. Among them, 11,118 kinds are from plants, 1,574 from animals and 80 from minerals. Dicotyledon occupies first place in natural drugs from plants, accounting for 8,598 kinds.
From the analysis of the technical level of development and application of natural drugs, situations are listed below. Bulk drugs, also Chinese Medicine traditionally, account for a large proportion in Chinese market; preparations or extracts are produced through a number of simple processing and most of the Chinese patent medicine are from them; pure natural and effective chemical compositions are demanded by FDA who also begins to ease restriction in recent years. Plant medicines, just as the name imply, are bulk drugs and preparations that take plant primary metabolites such as protein and amylose and secondary metabolites such as alkaloid, phenols and terpene as active ingredient. Traditional Chinese medicines and Chinese patent drugs made from plants in the market are all plant medicines.
Plant medicines play a dominant role in natural drugs. In some western Europe countries, such as Germany, plant medicine and health-care drinks have been widely accepted; America has eased restrictions on plant medicine by modifying relevant terms of FDA; countries and areas such as Korea, Japan, Taiwan and so on are big manufacturer of plant medicine; last year HongKong decided to spend huge sums to establish Chinese Medicine Port. The application of plant medicine in China is needless to say over. In the national Knowledge Innovation Project announced by the Chinese government in 1997, research of plant medicine was greatly emphasized.
For recent years, plant medicines are considered to be very important because of the unique advantage in the treatment. They are natural and have broad prospects in treating difficult and complicated diseases such as virus diseases with insignificant toxicity and side effects. A particularly growing area of study concerns the potential of plant medicines to cure skin diseases, including warts, hemorrhoids and molluscum. And with improving analytical methods, developers of plant medicines have also been able to determine the traceability and safety of these natural products. As a result, it is also becoming increasingly acceptable to use plant medicines for more serious illnesses such as herpes, HPV and IBS.
Natural drugs are made from natural materials, widely available with natural chemical compositions and smooth function. Their effectiveness is integral and bidirectional with little side effects; it is not easy to cause pathogenic microorganism to develop drug resistance; harmful residues seldom remain in animal body; and so on. Plant medicines are drugs that are extracted and separated according to the main physicochemical property and material characteristics from roots, stems, flows, skins, leaves, or fruits of plants. Most of the plant medicines are targeted with insignificant toxicity and side effects, which are one of the main sources of clinical drugs. To learn more, please go to http://www.naturespharma.org.
