The only systematic English-language description of the chemical structures and pharmacological effects of compounds active in traditional Chinese medicines
(Editor's update, November 2006: this book is no longer available).
In laboratories around the world the active principles in traditional herbal medicines are being isolated and characterised.
A systematic effort at the Chinese Academy of Sciences is underway to identify the structure-activity relationships that result from the link between chemistry and medicine that is permitted by this data.
This book, which provides the only systematic English-language description of the chemical structures and pharmacological effects of compounds active in traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs), is now in its second edition.
The new edition provides monographs on around 9000 chemicals that are known to be present in 1500 medicinally useful plants (or animals), and that are thought to be responsible for the medicinal effect of the plant or its extracts.
The chemistry of the major active components of each plant and the effects and indications of the medicines are described in this exhaustively indexed reference.
Contained within this book are many pharmacological relationships, which should provide compelling rationales for new drug development efforts.
The second edition of Traditional Chinese Medicines includes 2500 new compounds, more CAS Registry Numbers, and more pharmacological data.
The structure of the book has also been reorganised to make cross-referencing the data much simpler.
This new edition is therefore a substantial improvement on the first edition of this important reference on the structural chemistry of traditional Chinese medicines.
Jiaju Zhou, professor at the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, graduated from the Department of Chemistry, Peking University in 1963.
He is an organic and computational chemist who has spent many years studying the chemical composition of plants used medicinally in China.
He has worked for extended periods at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA, where he became expert in chemical data systems.
He has worked as a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia, Canada and Marseilles University, France.
Guirong Xie graduated from the chemistry department of Shandong University, Jinan, China in 1965.
Since then she has worked as a physical chemist in the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
As a visiting scholar, she worked for one year in the USA at the National Institute of Standards and Technology where she developed several metallurgic samples that were awarded certification as standard reference materials.
Since 1990 she has focused on computer-aided molecular design and databases relating to the structure and activity of compounds.
Xinjian Yan, graduated from the Department of Chemistry, Peking University in 1978, and received a PhD from the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991.
He conducted molecular modeling as postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Cancer, National Institutes of Health from 1992 to 1995 and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Texas at Austin from 1995 to 1996.
He studied traditional Chinese medicine at the Laboratory of Computer Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1996 to 1999.
Since 1999, he has been working at Texas University at College Station.
G W A Milne served 36 years as a research chemist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, USA.
Here he worked on the use of spectroscopy for structure determination of organic compounds, and on molecular modeling in the design of drugs for the treatment of cancer and Aids.
He has been active for many years in the fields of chemical information and chemical computation, and is the Editor of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences and Gardner's Chemical Synonyms and Trade Names, Eleventh Edition (Ashgate).
In 1999, jointly with Stephen Heller, Dr Milne was awarded the Skolnik Award of the Chemical Information Division of the American Chemical Society.
Traditional Chinese Medicines : hardback, 1424 pages, 0 566 08427 9, £295.00.
