Health security

Ancient Chinese medicine unlocks new possibilities for cancer treatment

More than 20 years ago, Yale pharmacology professor Yung-Chi Cheng, a leader in drug development for hepatitis B, cancer, and HIV, had a radical idea: What if he could unlock the therapeutic potential of ancient Chinese medicines for treating cancer? What if he could design botanical drugs that would make traditional cancer treatments work better?

No one had done it before. The Food and Drug Administration didn’t even have a process in place for approving multi-ingredient botanical drugs, and wouldn’t until 2004, when the agency released botanical drug-specific guidelines.

Fellow researchers and drug development experts advised him to change course. Developing botanical drugs was too complicated, they said, too risky.

But the idea had taken hold, and Cheng, the Henry Bronson Professor of Pharmacology at Yale School of Medicine, was not going to let it go.