(upbeat, jazzy music)
- I used to work at a large drug company,
in the United States.
One day, I suddenly realized,
why do we have to develop our synthetic compounds,
and then test them in clinical trials,
when traditional medicine provide us
with a huge untapped resources
of potentially effective and safe drugs, already?
And this drugs have been tested in human
for thousands of years.
All we have to do
is to apply modern technology
to insure the efficacy and the safety of this compound.
(upbeat, rhythmic music)
(gentle flute music)
- Today, we're in Beijing,
in the gardens
of the Institute of Medicinal Plant Development,
to meet with Dr. Chang Liu.
- He's using genomics
to study this vast collection of medicinal plant,
and their use in traditional Chinese medicine.
(upbeat, melodic music)
- Here we are
inside the Beijing Medicinal Gardens,
one of the top medicinal plant gardens in the world.
It's primary goal
is to conserve the plant resources for the nation.
And more so serve as a base for research
and the public education.
- China has a long history
in the use of traditional medicine.
- Yes, actually there's more than 10,000 medicinal plant
that's used in the traditional Chinese medicine,
which we call the TCM in short.
If you go through the literature,
there's more 100,000 of the medicinal recipes.
Three of the most famous one,
the first one is called Ben Cao Gang Mu.
It's actually written by a person named Li Shi-zhen
in the 16th century.
That is like the Chinese pharmacopeia in ancient China.
The second book is Shen nong Ben cao Jing.
What's amazing about this person is
he actually go to the wild
and taste all kinds of medicinal plants.
So it's the first personal trial.
The third one I would like to mention,
which is a connect to the modern drug discovery,
the name of the book is called
The Prescription for Emergency disease.
It's written by a person named Hong Ge in 340.
- A lot of modern medicines
really have their origins in traditional medicine.
- Yeah, that's certainly true.
Arteminisin is one of the list
of the first line medicine by WHO.
So it's still very, very effective.
Dr. Tu Youyou, she actually discovered
the Arteminisin, based on Ge Hong's book,
more than 20 years of work,
eventually her work won Nobel Prize in 2015.
So that's really a great demonstration
connecting the traditional medicine
and the modern medicine today.
- Is traditional medicine a big business in China?
- If we add everything together,
that's including the traditional medicine as drugs
and also as the function of food.
The total sales adds up to 250 billion US dollars.
That's a huge number.
- So what role does IMPLAD play in this industry?
- IMPLAD the full name of IMPLAD
is Institute of Medicinal Plant Development,
is affiliate with the Chinese Academy of Medical Science.
The main mission of IMPLAD is to preserve and develop,
and then utilize the medicinal plant resources.
It's also collaborating center of WHO in China.
So it's really the leader
in the medicinal plant research area in the world.
- So is there a chance that some of these original sources
would actually become extinct?
- Yes, that's actually a problem.
One of the most known example is ren shen,
is the king of herbs.
However the wild ren shen has extinct already.
So that certainly demonstrate the urgency
for us to take measures
to conserve the precious natural treasures.
(melodic music)
Plant are highly diverse.
However they are morphologically very, very similar.
Here we showed two example.
This medicinal plants
have very, very different chemical compositions,
and also therapeutic effects.
This, of course, will cause a problem
in the TCM product that's made from them.
(uptempo, rhythmic music)
Once we collect the samples from the garden,
the next step is to extract the DNA.
In order to do this,
the first step is to put the leaves into a mortar.
In the presence of liquid nitrogen,
we use the pestle to grind them.
Depends on the texture of the leaves,
you might have to repeat the steps a few times.
Once we have the leaves grinded,
the next step is we retrieve the samples
into micro centrifuge tube, add extraction buffers,
and then, after incubation,
we put the micro centrifuge onto a rotator
to make sure the solutions can be mixed very well.
After that,
we put in the micro centrifuge tube into a centrifuge
to separate the precipitate and the suspension.
After we get the DNA, the next step
is to construct a library to do the sequencing.
(bouncy, rhythmic music)
Once the DNA samples has been sequenced
the FASTQ files can be assembled to get the complete genome.
We map the reads to the completed genome.
And here in the bottom we shows the ATCG,
that's the base of the DNA sequence.
This picture here shows the annotated genome.
We can see that outside there's different blocks
with different colors,
they actually represent different genes
falling into different functional groups.
Once we have the whole genome sequenced
we can use all the sequence from genome
to do the phylogenetic analysis.
And this kind of genetic classification
tends to have a very high resolution, which is show here.
And very closely related species
can be discriminated successfully.
In this example here,
we obtained 10 different individual plant
and then we sequenced them.
This region can be used to discriminate individual plant.
That's going to be very, very helpful in terms of
insure the safety and
efficacy of TCM products in the future.
(gentle, rhythmic music)
- What inspires you about this work?
- My background involve both genomics and drug discovery.
So be very natural for me
to think about applying the genomic technology
to drug discovery, particular for traditional medicine.
- Where do you see the future of traditional medicine?
- In my view there's really no distinctive line
between the so called traditional medicine
and the modern medicine.
It's really just we look at the same thing,
human disease, from different perspectives.
Together, I think we can modernize the traditional medicine
and make it to meet human medical needs.