Drug leads for Chinese traditional medicines

Licensing opportunities

There are widespread efforts to rationally discover the active ingredients of traditional herbal medicines and turn them into registered treatments. Some companies are attempting to develop formal pharmaceutical products, often based on semi-synthetic versions of the original compound.

Others are working on rebranding traditional remedies as nutraceuticals. Whichever the approach, those in the field claim the long history of traditional use provides ample evidence of safety, if not efficacy.

Chinese traditional medicine is proving a particularly rich source of compounds and BioTech Transfer Taiwan lists several that are available to license.