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A vendor
packs dried herbs at her shop in the traditional Chinese
herb market in Taipei
on March 19, 2010 (AFP/File, Sam Yeh)
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PARIS —
Scientists in the United States on Sunday offered a molecular-level explanation
for how a Chinese herbal medicine used for more than 2,000 years tackles fever
and eases malaria.
The herb is
an extract of the root of a flowering plant called blue evergreen hydrangea,
known in Chinese as chang shan and in Latin as Dichroa febrifuga Lour.
Chang
shan's use dates back to the Han dynasty of 206 BC to 220 AD, according to
ancient documents recording Chinese oral traditions.
In 2009,
researchers made insights into its active ingredient, febrifuginone, which can
be pharmaceutically made as a molecule called halofuginone.
They found
that halofuginone prevented production of rogue Th17 immune cells which attack
healthy cells, causing inflammation that leads to fever.
A study
published in the journal Nature on Sunday found halofuginone works by hampering
production of proteins for making "bad" Th17 cells, but not the
"good" ones.
Specifically,
it blocks molecules called transfer RNA (tRNA), whose job is to assemble a
protein bit by bit, in line with the DNA code written in the gene.
As for
malaria, halofuginone appears to interfere with the same protein-assembly
process that enables malaria parasites to live in the blood, the study said.
"Our
new results solved a mystery that has puzzled people about the mechanism that
has been used to treat fever from a malaria infection going back probably 2,000
years or more," said Paul Schimmel, who headed the team at the Scripps
Research Institute in California.
Halofuginone
has been tested in small-scale human trials to treat cancer and muscular
dystrophy. Drug engineers also eye it as a potential tool for combatting
inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis, which are also autoimmune
diseases.
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