Chinese medicine is one of the most popular in the world, with an ancient tradition that is difficult to match – and perhaps like the dragon used as a symbol of secrets, the way in which it operates is just beginning to be revealed by Western science. Such is the case of the herb chang shan, used for thousands of years to treat fever associated with malaria, whose secrets have been discovered thanks to high-resolution images of its molecular structure carried out by The Scripps Research Institute.
In a work published in the prestigious science journal Nature de, he describes in atomic detail the «double-headed» compound derived from the active ingredient of chang shan. This compound, called halofuguinone (a derivative of febrifuguin), can suppress parts of the immune system-
The newly described structure shows that halofuguinone blocks the molecular machine that carries out «aminoacylation», the biological process that allows organisms to synthesize the proteins necessary for life. Elchang shan likely fights malaria because traces of halofuguinone-like chemicals in the herb interfere with the same process in malaria parasites, killing them in the blood of an infected person.
«Our new results solve the mystery of the mechanism of action of a medicine that had been used to treat fever from a malaria infection going back more than 2,000 years,» said Paul Schimmel of The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology.
Halofuguin has been used in clinical trials to treat cancer; the high-resolution images reveal that the molecule could be used as a template to create new medicines for numerous diseases. Chang shan, a plant popularly known as miraculous, could become a medicine of the first order.
[sciencedaily]
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