Traditional Chinese Medicines

This title was first published in 2003. In laboratories around the world the active principles in traditional herbal medicines are being isolated and characterized. 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 English-language monographs on over 9000 chemicals isolated from nearly 4000 natural sources used in Chinese medicine and features the addition of in-depth bioactivity data for many of the compounds. Effects and indications of the medicines are included. Extensive indexing permits cross-referencing among English, Chinese and Latin names for natural medicinal sources, effects and indications, and the chemical components of the medicines.

The second edition of Traditional Chinese Medicines includes 2300 new compounds, 2400 additional plant sources, more CAS Registry Numbers, and more pharmacological data. The structure of the book has been extensively 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.

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. Jiaju Zhou, Professor, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, graduated from the Department of Chemistry (a six-year program), 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. Guirong Xie graduated from the chemistry department of Shandong University, Jinan, China in 1965. Since 1990 she has focused on computer-aided molecular design and databases relating to the structure and activity of compounds. The Editor 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).