Pharmacognosy is the science of bioactive natural products with pharmaceutical or nutraceutical applications. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and herbal medicine use many crude herbs or extracts. Understanding the origin, identification, development, production, quality control and usage of traditional herbal medicine and other natural products are important for drug development, phytotherapy, and nutraceuticals. This introductory course will first cover the fundamentals of natural products, and the basic concepts of TCM. Next, the extraction of various chemical constituents, authentication analysis and quality control of plant derived extracts, and the regulatory measures of TCM and natural products will be discussed. More advanced topics including application of pharmaceutically active compounds in common diseases; good agricultural, cultivation, manufacturing practices; herbal-drug interactions; basic, translational, and clinical perspectives of drug discovery and development from natural product derivatives, recent advances in biotechnology, such as high - throughput screening, artificial intelligence in drug design, multi - omics technologies, genome editing, synthetic biology, bioengineering of natural products, advanced extraction technologies, etc. will be introduced.
3 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
Pharmacognosy is the science of bioactive natural products with pharmaceutical or nutraceutical applications. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and herbal medicine use many crude herbs or extracts. Understanding the origin, identification, development, production, quality control and usage of traditional herbal medicine and other natural products are important for drug development, phytotherapy, and nutraceuticals. This introductory course will first cover the fundamentals of natural products, and the basic concepts of TCM. Next, the extraction of various chemical constituents, authentication analysis and quality control of plant derived extracts, and the regulatory measures of TCM and natural products will be discussed. More advanced topics including application of pharmaceutically active compounds in common diseases; good agricultural, cultivation, manufacturing practices; herbal-drug interactions; basic, translational, and clinical perspectives of drug discovery and development from natural product derivatives, recent advances in biotechnology, such as high - throughput screening, artificial intelligence in drug design, multi - omics technologies, genome editing, synthetic biology, bioengineering of natural products, advanced extraction technologies, etc. will be introduced.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.