Understanding Interactions Between Chinese Medicines and Pharmaceutical Drugs in Integrative Healthcare

In the 21st century, the public are more informed, mainly via the Internet, about health and medical products and have become more knowledgeable about matters relating to their health conditions and well-being in curing and preventing illnesses. They often self-medicate themselves with various health products and over-the-counter （OTC） medicines apart from prescribed pharmaceutical drugs （PD）. Some of those non-prescribed products may have doubtful quality control and contain harmful additives or unchecked ingredients; thus their usefulness is in doubt. The increasing popularity world-wide of using Chinese medicines （CM） and related OTC functional products has raised concerns over their concomitant use with PD and the consequential adverse effects. In most cases the alleged causes of adverse effects are linked with herbal sources, although the authorised information on the interactions between CM-PD is not plentiful in the literature. There is an urgent need for such a data base. The future professionals in health and medical care should be knowledgeable or aware of what their patients have been taking or given. In actual practice the patients may receive both treatments intentionally or unintentionally, with or without the awareness of the practitioner. In these situations a reliable database for interactions between CM-PD will be extremely useful for consultation when treatment problems appear or during emergency situations. Their combining of medications may be involved with possible outcomes of adverse reactions or beneficial effects. Such a database will be welcomed by both practitioners of herbal medicines and orthodox medicine practitioners in the emerging trend of integrative medicine. The author has been involved in various research projects of basic and clinical aspects in mainly CM among other herbal and PD. Examples will be given largely on those related to these disciplines as illustrations in this overview.

Optimization of Analytical Conditions to Determine Steroids and Pharmaceuticals Drugs in Water Samples Using Solid Phase-Extraction and HPLC

Two reliable methods were optimized to determine two steroids (17?-Estradiol and 17?-Ethinylestradiol) and two pharmaceutical drugs (ibuprofen and naproxen) using Solid-Phase Extraction (SPE) for sample preparation and High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) for analysis. SPE (C18) conditions were evaluated varying elution solvent volume, pH conditions and sample mass in the cartridge and reduction techniques of the extract. The efficiency of the analytical methods was evaluated by spiking ultrapure water samples with compounds at three and four levels of concentration for steroids and pharmaceutical drugs, re- spectively. The recoveries were independent (P > 0.05) of added mass of target analytes with a repeatability lower than 6.5% for steroids and 12.1% for pharmaceutical compounds. The recovery factor (coefficient of variation, CV) was higher than 83% for steroids (CV 93% for pharmaceuticals (CV < 5.2%). The optimized analytical method was applied for the evaluation of a steroid degradation test using ozone, finding that the estimated limit of detection is sufficient to determine the residual mass (μg?L–1) of 17β-Estradiol after the experiment.

Computational Chemistry and Molecular Modeling Techniques for the Study of Micropeptin EI-964: Insights into Its Chemical Reactivity and Potential Pharmaceutical Properties

Micropeptin EI-964 is a cyclic peptide compound isolated from a marine cyanobacterium with potent inhibitory activity against serine proteases, particularly chymotrypsin and trypsin. It has shown promising activity against various cancer cell lines, making it a candidate for drug development. The unique structure and activity of Micropeptin EI-964 make it a promising lead compound for the development of novel serine protease inhibitors and anti-cancer drugs. Computational Chemistry and Molecular Modeling techniques can provide valuable insights into the chemical reactivity and pharmaceutical properties of Micropeptin EI-964, guiding the design and development of new compounds with enhanced bioactivity and improved drug-like properties.

~PEKING UNIVERSITY

Type of Company： Government institution. New Preparartions and Late-Model Drug Delivery System Technical Plaform of Peking University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences is a national technical plaform for developing new and important drugs. The person in charge for the platform is a pharmaceutical science professor of Peking University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences. The plaform selects the following as the main research areas： late-model carrier drug delivery system, biotechnological drug delivery system, mucous and transdermal drug delivery system, oral controlled-release drug delivery system, and four corresponding research teams are set up to study in depth the main problems and key issues.

Crystalline inclusion complexes formed between the drug diflunisal and block copolymers

The solid form of drugs plays a central role in optimizing the physicochemical properties of drugs,and new solid forms will provide more options to achieve the desirable pharmaceutical profiles of drugs.Recently,certain drugs have been found to form crystalline inclusion complexes（ICs） with multiple types of linear polymers,representing a new subcategory of pharmaceutical solids.In this study,we used diflunisal（DIF） as the model drug host and extended the guest of drug/polymer ICs from homopolymers to block copolymers of poly（ethylene glycol）（PEG） and poly（s-caprolactone）（PCL）.The block length in the guest copolymers showed a significant influence on the formation,thermal stability and dissolution behavior of the DIF ICs.Though the PEG block could hardly be included alone,it could indeed be included in the DIF ICs when the PCL block was long enough.The increase of the PCL block length produced IC crystals with improved thermal stability.The dissolution profiles of DIF/block copolymer ICs exhibited gradually decreased aqueous solubility and dissolution rate with the increasing PCL block length.These results demonstrate the possibility of using drug/polymer ICs to modulate the desired pharmaceutical profiles of drugs in a predictable and controllable manner.