A study team, led by Prof. CHENG Yiyu at Zhejiang University, made Tianjin the home to

the world's largest natural multi-component Chinese medicine bank on May 10, 2008. It

took five years for the team to collect and store 10,661 multi-component Chinese

medicines, and 235 compounds in the bank. As an important resource for developing

innovative drugs, the bank is physically a digital database possessing most information on

traditional Chinese medicines, and multi-component models, desirable for fast information

search.

Thanks to the support of National 973 Program and National Natural Science Foundation,

researchers have developed core technologies to produce multi-component Chinese

medicines in optimizing the design of traditional Chinese medicine. They have sorted out

some 270 potent constituents, and have preserved the constituents in digitized form.

Meanwhile, Zhejiang University School of Pharmacy, Tianjin University of Chinese

Medicine, and Tasly Group have jointly established an engineering center to develop

multi-component Chinese medicine, and to work on related theories. The efforts will

eventually create a national platform for developing major new drugs, with new TCM

models, and lead to an internationalized TCM industry.