Chinese pharmaceutical experts have been financed by government funding to decipher the effective elements of traditional Chinese herbal medicine by means of serum studies.

Wang Benxiang, a noted Chinese pharmaceutist, announced the research project Tuesday at the First China Forum on the Pharmaceutical and Medical Industries in Changchun, the capital of northeast China's Jilin Province.

Wang names serum as the "black box" of the unknown curative elements in herbal plants.

"To analyze traditional Chinese medicines is a huge and arduous task, since there are thousands of varieties of medicinal herbs. But by making laboratory tests on human or animal serum which carries ingredients of Chinese medicine, the complex work will be simplified," Wang told the forum.

The expert said a dose of traditional Chinese medicine usually contains numerous varieties of herbs and hence it is often impossible to tell which chemical ingredients cure specific illnesses.

This problem has prevented Chinese medicine from entering the world market. Many foreign countries often regard traditional Chinese medicine as food imports rather than drugs. As a result,

China, which turns out thousands of varieties of medicinal herbs, takes less than 6 percent of the global natural medicine market.

Wang, who has been involved in the pharmaceutical study of Chinese herbal medicines for some 40 years, is at the forefront of the serum studies for decoding the Chinese medicine, which forum participants have hailed as a breakthrough in the quest for the effective elements in traditional Chinese medicine.

Wang's study has obtained funding support from the

Wang has carried out experiments using human serum and rat serum containing glycoside herbal medicine.

People usually hold that effective elements of the traditional Chinese medicine derive from inherent chemical elements in herbs and from the processing, such as boiling. However, Wang's researches have discovered that there are other sources, namely, the metabolite of intestinal bacteria and the liver after the elements are absorbed into the blood.

Serum, (after effective elements of medicine has been taken) is the only place to find all four requirements, Wang noted. This method of research is the ideal way to uncover the mystery of Chinese medicine.

(Xinhua News Agency May 15, 2002)