Development of Lead Compounds in Herbal Medicines

Compared to synthetic compounds, herbal monomers tend to have higher biological activity and structural diversity and are more likely to enter cells to exert their effects. In addition, for some specific challenging targets, there is a greater probability of obtaining their modulators from herbal monomers by screening. Lifeasible is dedicated to the isolation and activity evaluation of physiologically important natural products in herbal medicines, helping you elucidate the active substance base in herbal medication and providing strategies for developing new structural and highly functional target lead compounds for innovative medicines.

Development Strategies

• Structure-based drug discovery. Large-scale virtual compound screening from identified targets for rapid discovery of lead compounds.
• Ligand-based drug discovery. Starting from existing drugs or active molecules, the molecular similarity is used to construct efficacy profile models to rapidly discover active molecules.
• Reverse screening. Predicting potential targets from existing drugs or active molecules.
• Compatibility-combination-based drug discovery. Combining the principles of compounding in herbal medicine with the principles of structural compounding in chemical drug design, we select active ingredients from classical clinical prescriptions for compounding and organically combine different drug units to achieve efficiency and toxicity reduction, thereby discovering lead compounds that can be developed into new clinical drugs.

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of a new drug development model based on compatibility-combination theory.

We help you to identify and optimize lead compounds as drug candidates by applying high content analysis (HCA), network pharmacology, genomics, functional genomics, and other methods for the multi-target screening of new drugs. The series of new chemical entities obtained based on the above development concept, whether by isolation or synthesis, are derived from the efficacy of classical prescriptions, and therefore their efficacy evaluation is based on the clinical application of the herbal compound. The selection of pharmacological activity screening models based on the type of disease treated by the formulae can effectively reduce the blindness of pre-screening and allow for a more targeted pharmacodynamic evaluation of the obtained series of compounds.

Lifeasible applies traditional drug use thinking, principles of modern drug design, and other relevant methods of modern drug discovery to the design of innovative drugs from herbal medicines to help you obtain lead compounds that match the characteristics of herbal medicine's action (multi-component, multi-target, multi-pathway). Please feel free to contact us to create development strategies for different needs and to meet our customers' bespoke requirements.

• High Throughput Screening of Active Ingredients in Herbal Medicines
• Evaluation of Biological Activity of Herbal Components
• Screening and Compounding of Herbal Medicinal Component Groups