Title
Characterization of the therapeutic properties of Chinese herbal materials by measuring delayed luminescence and dendritic cell-based immunomodulatory response
Author
Sun, M.
Chang, W.T.
van Wijk, E.
He, M.
Koval, S.
Lin, M.K.
Van Wijk, R.
Hankemeier, T.
van der Greef, J.
Wang, M.
Publication year
2017
Abstract
Based on the traditional Chinese medicine theory, the Chinese pharmacopeia assigns a therapeutic description of “taste” to all herbs; thus, an herb's “taste” is valued in traditional Chinese medicine as a major ethnopharmacological category and reflects the herb's therapeutic properties. These properties guide the practitioner with respect to preparing a specific herbal formula in order to provide each patient with a personalized intervention. The key challenge in evidence-based medicine is to characterize herbal therapeutic properties from a multi-target, multi-dimensional systems pharmacology perspective. Here, we used delayed luminescence (DL, the slowly decaying emission of photons following excitation with light) as a rapid, direct, highly sensitive indicator to characterize the properties of herbal medicines. The DL parameters were able to reliably identify a specific category of herbal materials with the so-called “sweet” taste. To support the DL results and provide biological relevance to the DL results, we used a murine bone marrow-derived dendritic cell-based assay to examine the immunomodulatory effects of herbal extracts from various “taste” categories. Our results indicate that DL may serve as a robust and sensitive tool for evaluating the therapeutic properties of herbs based on the traditional Chinese medicine classification of “taste”. Thus, DL provides a promising technological platform for investigating the properties of Chinese herbal medicines both qualitatively and quantitatively. © 2017
Subject
Life
MSB - Microbiology and Systems Biology
ELSS - Earth, Life and Social Sciences
Biomedical Innovation
Biology
Healthy Living
Chinese herbal medicine
Delayed luminescence
Dendritic cell
Immunity
Therapeutic classification
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jphotobiol.2017.01.018
TNO identifier
745610
ISSN
1011-1344
Source
Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology, 168, 1-11
Document type
article