Chip-based high-throughput screening of herbal medicines

Area of Science:

• Pharmacology
• Natural Products Chemistry
• Biotechnology

Background:

• High-throughput screening (HTS) in drug discovery traditionally relies on combinational chemistry libraries.
• Herbal medicines, used for millennia, offer diverse secondary metabolites valuable for drug discovery.
• Manual isolation of active compounds from complex herbal mixtures often leads to quality degradation in HTS programs.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review existing technologies for HTS of herbal medicines.
• To present the development of a novel chip-based HTS assay.
• To explore the antioxidant and radioprotective properties of herbal plants using this new assay.

Main Methods:

• Review of current microchip-based HTS technologies (e.g., Herbochip®, DNA chip, protein chip, cell chip).
• Development and implementation of a novel chip-based HTS assay.
• Assay application for evaluating antioxidant and radioprotective properties of selected herbal plants.

Main Results:

• Significant improvements in HTS are driven by microchip integration.
• Chip-based technologies enhance the quality and efficiency of herbal drug screening.
• The novel assay successfully explored antioxidant and radioprotective potentials of herbal plants.

Conclusions:

• Chip-based HTS technologies are crucial for overcoming quality control issues in herbal medicine screening.
• The developed novel assay provides an efficient platform for discovering new herbal drugs.
• This approach facilitates the identification of potent antioxidant and radioprotective agents from natural sources.