Universities harness AI to ‘modernize’ traditional medicine

Hong Kong is stepping up research into traditional Chinese medicine as part of China's efforts to enhance the scientific foundation and increase the application of age-old herbal remedies, by leveraging artificial intelligence to analyse data on traditional treatments used informally throughout East and Southeast Asia.

The School of Chinese Medicine at Hong Kong Baptist University is presently the leader within this region in conducting research into old remedies.

"We have a very active programme in drug discovery. A lot of these [Chinese medicines] are based on botanical drugs originally suggested by doctors a thousand years ago," Martin Wong, provost of Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), told University World News.

“The Hong Kong and Chinese governments want Hong Kong to experiment and come up with a new model of how to have Western medicine and Chinese medicine combined,” he said.

HKBU's long-established School of Chinese Medicine was the first Hong Kong government-funded institution to offer undergraduate programs in Chinese medicine and pharmacy. According to Wong, these combine elements of Western medicine as well.

This month, the Hong Kong government announced that the city's first Chinese Medicine Hospital - currently under construction - will open this December. HKBU has been a key advisor for the government-funded hospital, which it will manage.

Setting up Hong Kong as a centre for Chinese medicine and integrating Chinese and Western medicine will also accelerate the research in traditional medicines and possibly allow clinical trails, said experts.

Collaboration agreements were signed on 9 September with HKBU and Hong Kong's two medical schools, at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) - both globally renowned for their biomedical research. Experts at the three universities will support the new hospital's clinical services, extending the use of Chinese medicines beyond primary healthcare. They will also conduct research at the hospitals.

Research on Chinese herbal remedies

HKBU is using modern data science and AI to research herbal medicines with a view to developing new drugs aimed at the global market as well as modernizing Chinese medicine, said Wong. AI is also used to analyze chemical compounds in plants.

Lyu Aiping, vice-president (Research and Development) at HKBU and a member of its Chinese medicine faculty, told University World News: "We envision a future where data science and AI illuminate what Chinese medicine research has long intimated, providing deeper insights into health classifications and compound interventions."

Wong said, "At HKBU we start with a lot of clinical data based on historical [materials] about what doctors prescribed for patients with certain medical problems and what these plants are good for. Once we have that, we want to develop some drugs based on the clinical data."

We use very sophisticated analyses using AI and find out a lot of potential drug candidates. Once you have these, you go into the next stage of modern biochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, to see where these are viable and safe.

Wong said the aim was to apply to file drug patents based on traditional Chinese medicines. A few drugs developed at HKBU have been given FDA approval for clinical trials, he pointed out.

One of these has already been granted "orphan drug" status by the FDA for the treatment of myofibrillar myopathy, a rare neuromuscular disease caused mainly by genetic mutations.

According to a report titled Evolving Legacy: Decoding the scientific trajectory of Chinese medicine released in June by HKBU and Elsevier, the first bibliometric analysis of Chinese medicine covering the past decade, research papers on Chinese medicine nearly tripled between 2014 and 2023.

The report found that Chinese medicine researchers are producing high-impact work mainly in the mainland of China, underlined growing interdisciplinary collaboration, and an uptick in international partnerships with other countries.

Western vs Chinese approaches

He explained that the approaches utilized in Western drug development were different from those of Chinese medicine; Chinese medicine would stress combination therapies, a "whole body" approach to symptoms of disease, and social and environmental factors.

Western drugs, he noted, isolate medical diseases by diagnosis with no linkage between diseases, but with Chinese medicine “we can find some connection between two different diseases that would modify current interventions [treatments]”.

He employs a "systems medicine" approach, which focuses on complex disease interaction and is not just limited to a single disease treatment. This is in recognition that diseases like diabetes and hypertension interact dynamically in the human body.

The Western process isolates single compounds, takes the active ingredient, and incorporates it into the drug for a diagnosis without linkage between diseases, while Chinese medicine combines herbs that commonly have multiple compounds that work in harmony, Lyu said.

"The future of medicine," he said, "is to understand these complex interactions and move beyond the traditional single-compound drug discovery model.

He believes that up to two or three compounds in combination can improve treatment efficacy. “Chinese medicine can actually show us how future medicine could get done,” he said, with much enthusiasm.

"Robust clinical evidence is critical to acceptance, however," he said.

"Clinical trials have become more and more important to prove efficacy," Lyu said, noting: "Worldwide, more and more clinical trials on Chinese herbal products have been published.

"In all the clinical trials I conduct, I collect more samples and, with the help of AI, try to analyze the difference in responsiveness and then try to find out the reason for those non-responsive cases."

"So rather than pure clinical trials on efficacy > [this approach] would add a stage of clinical trial plus clinical pharmacology."

Dual fluency HKBU's degrees in Chinese medicine are especially popular with Mainland students, although only one in six applicants from outside Hong Kong are admitted to the HKBU programmes, according to Wong. The school also offers a Masters in Chinese Medicine Drug Discovery. Lyu believes the next generation of Chinese medicine professionals would need "deep, dual fluency – not only in traditional Chinese medicine, but also in contemporary biomedical sciences."