A jar of browny-green goo is all it took to end Dr Stephen Minger’s doubtsabout whether traditional Chinese medicine could teach anything to Western science. When a colleague walked into the leading stem cell scientist’s lab at King’s College London with a Chinese remedy that he believed could boost brain cell growth, and asked if he could test his theory on some neurons that Dr Minger had grown in his lab, he wasn’t keen.

“My first thought was ‘you’re not putting that on my cells’. But it turned out to be amazing stuff. It really stimulated the cells to grow; they grew like weeds,” recalls Dr Minger, the ponytailed scientist who has has been in the spotlight since 2003, when his team created the UK’s first lab-grown human embryonic stem cells. These are the “blank-slate” cells that have the power to turn into any cell of the body and may be key in producing more effective treatments for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson’s.

But for all of his scientific credentials, Dr Minger is about to step out of the conventional and into the alternative. At the time of the “green-goo” incident, neither he nor his colleague had the time or money to investigate further the ancient remedy that produced such an astonishing effect. But the experience stayed with Dr Minger and he began to view Chinese medicine in a different light. If its remedies could make brain cells grow, could they help to treat diseases that destroy the brain such as Alzheimer’s?

Now the Government has asked him to head a two-year project aimed at strengthening links between UK and Chinese scientists. He immediately thought of using the project as a way of probing the ancient cures of traditional Chinese medicine, often referred to as TCM, to see if they can be converted into modern treatments.

Searching for tangible effects

The project starts this month. Dr Minger will fly to Shanghai to bring together Alzheimer’s scientists in the UK with Chinese researchers in the hope of mining TCM for new medicines for the disease. He believes that the traditional system, based on energy flow in the body, yin and yang, anecdotal evidence and treatments made from ground-up plant and animal products, can help evidence-based Western medicine. So do many drug developers in the West who are turning their attention to TCM in the hope that the thousands of remedies in its armoury may have tangible biological and therapeutic effects.

“I think there are clearly active ingredients in some of these plant extracts which have potent biological effects,” says Dr Minger. “It’s not that surprising when you look at the fact that Taxol, a cancer treatment, originally came from yew, and aspirin from willow. Assuming that this project works, TCM could represent a whole new class of drugs that no one has had access to before.”

He believes that there is a pressing need for new Alzheimer’s treatments. “It is such a huge healthcare burden; it’s projected to bankrupt most Western countries in the next 50 years. There are almost no therapies and the existing ones work only on a subset of people. Plus, in most cases, they only slightly slow the progression of the disease.”

Rebecca Wood, the chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, agrees that looking for potential cures in Chinese medicine could open up new avenues of treatment. “It’s always worth looking at the unusual. We shouldn’t assume we’ve got all the answers here. Just because something is traditional doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have active compounds in it.”

In fact, experts estimate that one in four prescription medications used in the UK was originally developed from plants. Dr Paul Francis, a neuroscientist at King’s College London and one of the Alzheimer’s researchers who will join Dr Minger in China, points out that even some of the conventional Alzheimer’s medications prescribed in the UK started off as shrubs.

“If you look at the three drugs currently available, one of them came from daffodils and snowdrops,” he says. Further, many current conventional treatments are based on Chinese herbal remedies (see panel, right), including a possible treatment for dementia.

In recent years the Chinese Government has invested huge sums into investigating whether its vast library of traditional remedies can be converted into orthodox treatments.

“The Chinese are very committed to this,” says Dr Minger. “They have state-run labs that are doing nothing except investigate TCM.”

But developing conventional drugs from these ancient cures is not an easy process as a single remedy can contain many different plant ingredients. How do you know which one is responsible for the curative effect, and is this effect due to one ingredient or a combination?

The process starts with scientists identifying a remedy that they think may have therapeutic potential. Using modern technology – and working by a process of elimination – they test each fraction of the remedy for biological activity, discarding the pieces that have no effect. They continue until they have sieved the remedy down to a point where only a few chemical constituents remain, which they deduce must be the ones that elicit the therapeutic effect. Artificial copies of the active chemical are then made and tested on patients in clinical trials.

But why can’t they just give patients the traditional remedies in their native form? Because, Dr Francis says, they are not guaranteed to have any medicinal effect, and, more importantly, they may be dangerous.

Barrage of safety tests are needed

No two traditional remedies are the same, he says, unlike a pharmaceutical treatment where each pill has an identical composition. The remedies also need to undergo conventional scientific testing to make sure that they won’t interact with other medication. This involves a barrage of safety tests, test-tube studies and, eventually, trials in patients. “Any chemical, even a natural chemical, can have side-effects,” says Dr Francis.

Dr Minger, who believes that East-West scientific collaborations are the way forward for UK researchers, says that he may also use it to investigate whether TCM holds any potential treatments for cancer.

“China is going like gang-busters, particularly if you’re thinking in terms of medicine and pharmaceuticals. In many cases their labs are as good, if not better, than labs here or in the US. A lot of Chinese scientists also are moving back. When you ask them why, they say it’s too good a place not to be right now.”

Does Dr Minger anticipate any culture clashes? “Most of the Chinese guys are Western-trained so it’s not that difficult to work together,” he says. Plus, much of their science is regulated to the same level as UK science. The only potential problem he sees is the traffic. “It takes for ever to get anywhere. When you’re scheduling something, you have to pack in so much extra time to get from one place to another.” And he has learnt from the green goo incident how important it is to have no preconceptions. “I think it just takes a little bit of open-mindedness.”

Chinese healing Drugs based on traditional medicine can help these conditions

Malaria The antimalarial drug artesunate, derived from sweet wormwood plant, is used worldwide.

Cancer Researchers from the University of Texas are testing toad venom to see whether it can treat cancer.

Healthy heart Hawthorn, a remedy traditionally used to treat nausea, may help patients with chronic heart failure.

Diabetes Animal studies have indicated that the herb angelica can help.

Stroke A treatment based on red sage is under trial in Singapore.

Timely reminders

18 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease worldwide. This figure is projected to double by 2025

One in 20 people over the age of 65 in the UK has Alzheimer’s, rising to nearly one in two by the age of 85

£17 billion is the annual cost of dementia to the UK economy

1.9 million people over the age of 65 in China have Alzheimer’s

Source: World Health Organisation; NHS; Alzheimer's Society; Neuroepidemiology; CIA

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