A Prototype Traditional Chinese Medicinal Plant Library at the National Cancer Institute

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has evolved over thousands of years in China and other Asian countries for the treatment and symptom management of a wide range of medical conditions. The successful development of anti-malaria drug artemisinin, of which the discovery was inspired by a TCM practice, further highlighted the importance of this unique resource for modern drug discovery and development. Previously a prototype TCM library has been established through joint efforts of US and Chinese scientists, consisting of more than 200 authenticated medicinal plant and fungal species that collectively represent the potential therapeutic content of the majority of common TCM prescriptions [1]. The collection has duplicate or triplicate kilogram quantities of each herb species that were collected at 2 – 3 sites with precise GPS documentation and have been authenticated visually and chemically. A processed library from a subset of this collection has recently been developed at the National Cancer Institute, which contains both the organic solvent and aqueous extraction of 331 samples of 133 TCM plant species in 96- and 384-well plate formats and is accessible by drug discovery researchers worldwide. Here we report the results of the preliminary “proof of principle” assessment of the anti-cancer activity of this crude extract library in NCI-60 human cancer cell lines screen, as well as the chemical profiling and comparison analysis of selected active extracts. It is hoped that this prototype TCM plant library will promote scientific discoveries with therapeutic potential and enhance international efforts to systematically evaluate commonly used TCM herbal therapies.