Characterization of the therapeutic properties of Chinese herbal materials by measuring delayed luminescence and dendritic cell-based immunomodulatory response

Authors Sun, Mengmeng; Chang, Wen-Te; Van Wijk, Eduard; He, Min; Koval, Slavik; Lin, Ming-Kuem; Van Wijk, Roel; Hankemeier, Thomas; van der Greef, Jan; Wang, Mei

Journal JOURNAL OF PHOTOCHEMISTRY AND PHOTOBIOLOGY B-BIOLOGY , MAR 2017,:168

DOI 10.1016/j.jphotobiol.2017.01.018 PubMed 28147303

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. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.