Characterization of the therapeutic properties of Chinese herbal materials by measuring delayed luminescence and dendritic cell-based immunomodulatory response.

Based on the traditional Chinese medicine theory, the Chinese pharmacopeia assigns a therapeutic description of "taste" to all herbs; thus, an herb's "taste" is valued in traditional Chinese medicine as a major ethnopharmacological category and reflects the herb's therapeutic properties. These properties guide the practitioner with respect to preparing a specific herbal formula in order to provide each patient with a personalized intervention. The key challenge in evidence-based medicine is to characterize herbal therapeutic properties from a multi-target, multi-dimensional systems pharmacology perspective. Here, we used delayed luminescence (DL, the slowly decaying emission of photons following excitation with light) as a rapid, direct, highly sensitive indicator to characterize the properties of herbal medicines. The DL parameters were able to reliably identify a specific category of herbal materials with the so-called "sweet" taste. To support the DL results and provide biological relevance to the DL results, we used a murine bone marrow-derived dendritic cell-based assay to examine the immunomodulatory effects of herbal extracts from various "taste" categories. Our results indicate that DL may serve as a robust and sensitive tool for evaluating the therapeutic properties of herbs based on the traditional Chinese medicine classification of "taste". Thus, DL provides a promising technological platform for investigating the properties of Chinese herbal medicines both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Immune-induced flavor aversion in mice: modification by neonatal capsaicin treatment.

OBJECTIVE: This study was designed to evaluate the role of c-sensitive fibers in the establishment of immune-induced flavor aversion in mice. METHODS: Mice were treated neonatally with capsaicin in order to destroy c-sensitive fibers; after such treatment, adult animals, immunized or not with ovalbumin, were submitted to a two-bottle preference test, with a choice between water and a sweetened egg white solution. RESULTS: Neonatal capsaicin treatment was unsuccessful in preventing the development of immune-induced aversion to the sweetened solution containing the antigen. Nonetheless, amongst immunized mice, those which had been previously treated with capsaicin showed a significant increment in the preference for the sweetened egg white solution. Furthermore, our data showed that neonatal capsaicin treatment did not interfere with either IgG1 or IgE production. CONCLUSION: The present results suggest that c-sensitive fibers have a role in the transmission of the signals generated by this immune response to the central nervous system, thus contributing to the development of a flavor aversion in mice.