AZ using Chinese alliance to beat the bush for new drug leads
This article was originally published in Scrip
In another sign that mainstream pharma companies are beginning to embrace the potential of traditional medicines, AstraZeneca has entered into an alliance with a leading Chinese university to derive novel cardiovascular drug leads from a herbal compound.
The basic research collaboration with Shanghai's Fudan University will focus initially on preclinical studies to elucidate the mechanism of action of leonurine, an active alkaloid compound derived from motherwort.
This dried aerial portion of the perennial shrub Leonurus heterophyllus has long been used in Chinese medicine for a variety of ailments including improvement of blood flow, and AstraZeneca points to more recent preclinical studies confirming its activity in acute and chronic myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke and atherosclerosis.
The pharmacy school at Fudan, a leading research site for cardiovascular disease in China, will work with scientists from the UK firm's cardiovascular and gastrointestinal innovative medicines group over an initial two-year period. The hope is to determine the structure and molecular-level mode of action of leonurine to help identify novel drug targets and new disease pathways for therapeutic intervention.
The collaboration "aims to shed new light on some very promising cardiovascular effects seen with leonurine," said the head of the AstraZeneca group, Dr Gunnar Olsson.
The financial terms of the tie-up were not disclosed.
A number of foreign multinationals already have similar collaborations with research institutions in China, and earlier this year GlaxoSmithKline unveiled a program at its R&D site in Shanghai that is also looking at how herbal drugs work. The objective is to derive new targets and structures to inform synthetic chemistry work for novel small molecule drugs (scripintelligence.com, 17 September 2012).