Chinese herbal medicines are the enriched resources which contain various pharmacological constituents. The benefits have attracted the interests of many researches around the world to explore new drugs from natural products. In the past, the cytotoxic activity is the major way to evaluate the potency of natural products or plant extracts. A major drawback of this cytotoxicity-based screening is the lack of understanding of the underlying signaling mechanisms. In contrast, the molecular target-based bioassay platform provides a high efficient method for drug discovery. This strategy has been successful applied to the screening of synthetical compound libraries, generating useful lead compounds for structural optimization. For the natural product filed, this proposal represents the first attempt to include this new strategy. This one year project proposes to identify new target-based anticancer agents from natural product libraries.
