Innovate-UK awards grant to investigate Traditional Chinese Medicine for treatment of lung disease

A team of nine researchers from the University of Southampton Global-NAMRIP (Global Network for Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Prevention) group has been visiting colleagues in China to launch a new collaborative project.

They will investigate Traditional Chinese Medicine for the treatment of flare-ups of the chronic lung disease COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). COPD affects over one million patients in the UK, and flare-ups are usually treated with antibiotics and steroids.

Professor Michael Moore and colleagues at the Department of Primary Care, the NIHR core-funded Southampton Clinical Trials Unit (SCTU) and Clinical and Experimental Sciences have won a grant from Innovate-UK, co-funded by the Chinese government’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). They will collaborate with the Centre for Evidence-Based Chinese Medicine at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine (BUCM), Phoenix Medical Ltd and Anhui Jiren Pharmaceutical Company Ltd in China to investigate the effect of a Chinese medicine called “Shufeng Jiedu”. This combination of eight traditional herbs will be given alongside conventional treatment, to see whether it will help COPD patients with flare-ups to improve faster, and reduce the need for antibiotics.

Professor Tom Wilkinson and his team will test the effects of the herbs in human lung tissue in their laboratory, while Professor Moore and the SCTU team will test the feasibility of running a clinical trial of Shufeng Jiedu to treat patients with COPD flare-ups in Wessex. Dr Xiao-Yang Hu (Southampton) and Professor Liu (BUCM) are leading a review of the literature about the herbal medicine and all its components – preliminary results from this suggest the medicine is safe and could help patients with COPD flare-ups to recover faster.

The team was invited by Professor Jianping Liu to visit his Centre for Evidence Based Chinese Medicine and two hospitals where his group will also be running a clinical trial of the same medicine in China. Professor Gareth Griffiths and colleagues at SCTU ran a one-day training session for BUCM on management of clinical trials, to ensure a high standard of clinical trials in both collaborating countries. The Southampton team visited the modern factory making Shufeng Jiedu capsules in Bozhou, a historic city in Anhui province, where Chinese herbal medicine has been prepared for over 2000 years, and which has the largest Chinese medicine market in the world.