ABSTRACT
In recent years, as more and more innovative drug products are going off patent, the search for new medicines that treat critical and/or life-threatening diseases has become the center of attention of many pharmaceutical companies. As indicated by Chow and Liu (2000b), pharmaceutical research and development is a lengthy and costly process. On average, it may take more than 12 years to bring a promising compound to the market. The probability of success, however, is usually very low. In the past several decades, tremendous effort was put on drug research and development, and yet only a handful of new drug products were approved by the regulatory agencies. As a result, an alternative approach for drug discovery is necessary. This leads to the study of the potential use of promising traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs), especially those intended for treating critical and/or life-threatening diseases. A TCM is deŒned as a Chinese herbal medicine developed for treating patients with certain diseases as diagnosed by the four major Chinese diagnostic techniques of inspection, auscultation and olfaction, interrogation, and pulse taking and palpation, based on traditional Chinese medical theory of global dynamic balance among the functions/activities of all the organs of the body.
