Yu Zong Chen
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Title: Finding drug discovery clues from the informatics analysis of traditional medicines
Biography
Biography: Yu Zong Chen
Abstract
The discovery of Artemisinin by Tu YouYou gives a good example of drug discovery based on the clues from the traditional medicines. A question is whether Tu’s miraculous discovery tale can be repeated by the modern informatics analysis of the traditional medicines. We investigated this question by examining to what extent the known drug-productive herbs in the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) can be indicated by comparative analysis of the traditionally described medicinal functions with respect to the targeted therapeutic symptoms. We found that the drug-productive herbs may be indicated at lower false rate by coupling the analysis of the TCM functions together with the knowledge of the phylogenetically clustered distribution patterns of drug-productive species. Traditional medicines also offer new therapeutic approaches based on synergistic combination of low-potency natural products. We quantitatively studied the potency gaps between the approved drugs and the natural products of the same therapeutic classes, and evaluated the questions of whether, at what probability, and by what mechanisms these potency gaps can be overcome by the synergistic combinations of the natural products.