During “World Medicine Summit” organized by Macau University of Science and Technology two members of National Academy of Science of US, Prof. Louis Miller and Prof. Michael Hall, visited our State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine (SKL) on 8th July, 2015. Prof. Miller, who is the Chief of Malaria Cell Biology Section at the National Institute of Health (NIH), was the pioneer researcher of the discovery of the genetic basis of resistance of virus that caused malaria. During his visit, he shared his experience of his long-time research in malaria, and told us that the most effective anti-malaria drug is still Artimensins, which is a purified compound derived from the Chinese Herb (Qinghao). He found it amazing that the best drug for treating such a difficult disease can actually and simply be found from a herbal that exist in nature naturally. He valued traditional Chinese medicine and emphasized the importance of hearing the experience of traditional herbal usage and herbal formulation from Chinese medicine clinician.
Prof. Hall is a pioneer researcher in the field of mTOR, which is a master energy sensor and switch to regulate cell growth and metabolism. The mTOR pathway regulates multiple complex disease, including obesity, diabetes, cancer and neurodegenerative disease. He through that our SKL has already equipped with high standard of equipment to perform good research. He also expressed his interested on our current SKL research findings on using Chinse herbal medicine to treat cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, which are complex disease that are massively regulated by energy metabolism, potentially also on mTOR pathway. Both academicians expressed their encouragement on our SKL to keep using modern scientific research method together with the state-of-the-art technology to continue the research work on Chinese herbal, they believed the next useful compound could be identified from Chinse herbal soon for better the humankind.
Left to right: Dr. Vincent Wong, Prof. Michael Hall, Prof. Louis Miller & Dr. Elaine Leung
