Question

Question 1: Compare between the traditional medicine and the modern drug discovery and development.

Answer 1

Traditional medicines

TM is the oldest form of health care in the world and is used in the prevention, and treatment of physical and mental illnesses. Traditional medicines (TMs) make use of natural products and are of great importance.

Discovery: Since prehistoric times, humans have used natural products, such as plants, animals, microorganisms, and marine organisms, in medicines to alleviate and treat diseases. According to fossil records, the human use of plants as medicines may be traced back at least 60,000 years.

It is highly probable that when seeking food, early humans often consumed poisonous plants, which led to vomiting, diarrhea, coma, or other toxic reactions—perhaps even death. However, in this way, early humans were able to develop knowledge about edible materials and natural medicines. Subsequently, humans invented fire, learned how to make alcohol, developed religions, and made technological breakthroughs, and they learned how to develop new drugs.

Development: In TM, “clinical trials” have been conducted since ancient times. In the case of TM, considerable experience and advances have been accumulated and developed over the past thousands of years with respect to methods of preparation, selection of herbs, identification of medicinal materials, and the best time for obtaining various different plants. Appropriate processing and dose regulation are urgently needed in TM to improve drug efficacy and reduce drug toxicity. Considerable amounts of data have been acquired through clinical experiments, and in this way TM has assisted in the development of modern drugs.

Advantages: Through its use of natural products, TM offers merits over other forms of medicine in such areas as the following: discovery of lead compounds and drug candidates; examining drug-like activity; and exploring physicochemical, biochemical, pharmacokinetic, and toxicological characteristics. If any form of TM is applied successfully, it may surprisingly assist in the development of new drugs, thereby resulting in many benefits, such as significant cost reductions.

Such forms of medicine as Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), Ayurveda, Kampo, traditional Korean medicine (TKM), and Unani employ natural products and have been practiced all over the world for hundreds or even thousands of years, and they have blossomed into orderly-regulated systems of medicine.

Modern drug

Discovery: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the era of “modern” drugs began. In 1805, the first pharmacologically-active compound morphine was isolated by a young German pharmacist, Friedrich Sertürner, from the opium plant. Subsequently, countless active compounds have been separated from natural products.

Among anticancer drugs approved in the time frame of about 1940–2002, approximately 54% were derived natural products or drugs inspired from knowledge related to such. For instance, the Vinca alkaloids from Catharanthus roseus, and the terpene paclitaxel from Taxus baccata, are among successful anticancer drugs originally derived from plants

Development: In developing new drugs, the pharmaceutical industry has tended to adopt high-throughput synthesis and combinatorial chemistry-based drug development since the 1980s. Scientists have conducted comprehensive research in such areas as pharmaceutical chemistry, organic synthetic chemistry, and chemical biology. Through etherification and esterification, they have produced a series of well-known new drugs,

TM is too valuable to be ignored in the research and development of modern drugs. Though it has an enigmatic character, there are also wide contexts for its use in terms of non-Western medical technology or activities.In TM, a single herb or formula may contain many phytochemical constituents, such as alkaloids, terpenoids, flavonoids, etc. Generally speaking, these chemicals function alone or in conjunction with one another to produce the desired pharmacological effect. It is notable that a lot of plant-originated drugs in clinical medicine today were derived from TM.

After the initial cytotoxicity tests were carried out using crude extracts, Taxus brevifolia was chosen for further research.

Example: Taxol was isolated as a new compound from T. Brevifolia. Taxol has an unusual chemical structure and radically distinctive mechanism of action and was developed as a novel anticancer drug in subsequent decades. Nevertheless, the drug attracted little attention during the early stage of its development because of its poor solubility in water, low yield from natural products, and other disadvantages. Fortunately, it underwent extraction, isolation, and structural determination; its activity against solid tumors and its mechanism of action were established, and it became developed for clinical practice. Finally, Taxol was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for treating ovarian cancer in 1992—21 years after the initial breakthrough paper recording its isolation and structural identification. Taxol has remained a basic drug for treating various forms of cancer, and is still being used to develop new synergistic groups of anticancer drugs.