At present, there are more than 4,800 diseases found, but only more than 250 can be completely cured. One of the reasons for so many "unmet medical needs" is actually related to the current design of chemical drugs.
At present, most common chemical drugs are designed for a single cause of disease, trying to find a way to treat the disease. However, this design method has a blind spot. Huang Qiying, a professor at the Institute of Biomedicine of Yangming University, said that many diseases are not caused by a single cause, which leads to the use of "single-target" chemicals, which cannot achieve a radical cure for some diseases.
The winning way of new plant drugs lies in multi-target therapy.
Different from chemical drugs, the newly popular new botanical drugs are non-single multi-target therapy. Huang Qiying pointed out that the new plant medicine is the crystallization of thousands of years of human trials of the Chinese nation, which has inherited valuable clinical experience and is worth cherishing and making good use of.
On 20 10, China TFDA issued the first certificate of new plant medicine: Astragalus polysaccharide injection, with the approved indication of "cancer-related fatigue"; Astragalus polysaccharide injection is made from Astragalus membranaceus in northern China. Through systematic research and experiments, the curative effect has been verified by western scientific methods.
In recent years, * * * has been committed to promoting the Chinese herbal medicine industry, including the "Strengthening Biotechnology Industry Promotion Plan" adopted by the Executive Yuan 1995, and scientific Chinese herbal medicine has been given priority to the development of the industry; Since 200 1, the "five-year plan for industrial technology development of Chinese herbal medicines" led by the Ministry of Economic Affairs has encouraged enterprise research institutes, such as industrial research institutes and biotechnology centers, and more pharmaceutical companies to invest in research in this related field.
Testing raw materials of new plant drugs by chemical fingerprint.
Nowadays, new botanical drugs still face many challenges, one of which is that plants from nature must have the consistency of different batches of raw materials. Huang Qiying said that the FDA has approved two kinds of botanical drugs, but the application for new botanical drugs is very strict. Review and check the main components and chemical fingerprints of at least three different batches of new botanical drugs, so as to accurately define the component items and content ratio of standard botanical drugs and confirm that they meet the quality requirements of western science and clinical disease treatment.
Huang Qiying emphasized that many protein drugs and macromolecular drugs use biochips to measure the similarity of different batches, and now the same technology is used to check the quality and mechanism of new plant drugs.
Refined astragalus polysaccharides can reduce mitochondrial damage and prevent cancer fatigue.
Take Astragalus polysaccharide injection as an example. Its raw material comes from Astragalus membranaceus produced in Inner Mongolia, which is recognized by the World Health Organization and listed in the WHO Pharmacopoeia. The concentration of refined Astragalus polysaccharide, one of the effective components, is high. Through the modern patented concentration and purification pharmaceutical technology, a new plant medicine has been made, and it has also undergone rigorous human clinical trials. According to the research data of biochip, cells were treated with three different batches of refined Astragalus polysaccharides to observe the genetic changes of cells. It is found that the similarity of the changes reaches 99%, which confirms the consistency of their quality.
According to the investigation of Taiwan Province Cancer Palliative Society in 20 15 years, up to 92% of cancer patients suffer from cancer-related fatigue, and14 of them have reached moderate to severe fatigue and need medical treatment. Huang Qiying said that some chemotherapy can damage granular glands in cells. Mitochondria are called cell power plants and are the main source of energy. Once damaged, it will have many side effects, leading to many functional problems in the body. Experiments show that the combination of refined Astragalus polysaccharide and chemotherapy can reduce mitochondrial damage, and the research team is conducting further research.
Refine Astragalus Polysaccharide three times a week, and 70% patients with cancer fatigue are obviously improved.
Nine medical centers, such as Chang Gung Memorial and Ma Kai, recently completed a large-scale phase IV clinical trial, in which 3 10 cancer patients with moderate and severe cancer-related fatigue were treated with Astragalus polysaccharide injection three times a week, showing that nearly 70% of the subjects' cancer-related fatigue was improved.
At the same time, the study found that early use is more effective in cancer patients with no physical decline. The clinical results were also written into a paper, which was published by the internationally renowned medical journal Cancer in February 2065438+2009.
Chemotherapy combined with refined astragalus polysaccharides can reduce side effects.
Another study jointly conducted by Taipei Rongzong and Yangming University found that chemotherapy combined with refined Astragalus polysaccharides can increase the neutrophil lymphocyte ratio (NLR, one of the prognostic factors of cancer), and several biological indexes in the blood gradually tend to the values that healthy people should have. The research results have also been published at the Taiwan Province Joint Conference on Cancer (TJCC) on 20 19.
The research published by the cancer team of Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Linkou in the internationally renowned medical journal Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology found that patients with squamous cell carcinoma (accounting for 90% of patients with oral cancer) can reduce side effects such as anemia, anorexia and vomiting and improve their quality of life if they are combined with refined Astragalus polysaccharides during chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Huang Qiying said that many previous studies showed that refined Astragalus polysaccharides inhibited cancer stem cells.