Researcher: Prof Zhang Hongjie, School of Chinese Medicine
This project strives to establish an evaluation platform to discover novel antiviral agents against emerging and re-emerging viruses including the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Emerging and re-emerging viruses have constantly caused deadly diseases in human history. One of the deadliest viruses was the 1918 Spanish H1N1 influenza virus that killed approximately 40-80 million people. Over the past 40 years, there have been various of pandemic or epidemic diseases caused by emerging and re-emerging viruses such as HIV, SARS-CoV-2 and H1N1 influenza virus. HIV has killed approximately 32 million people since its discovery in 1981. As of May 10, 2020, the current COVID-19 epidemic has already caused 280,594 deaths among over 4 million infected cases. Ebola virus outbreaks have occurred periodically since 1970s, their mortality rates have ranged among 40-90 %. These are just a few examples of the emerging and re-emerging viruses that have brought huge burdens on world economy and public health systems. Nonetheless, we human seem to be helpless as to their invasion. We have no curable drugs, nor vaccines to combat them. Fortunately, the nature has provided us a huge plant resource from where we may uncover therapeutic recipe to fight against the vicious viruses.
We are dedicated to discover novel antiviral agents from the medicinal and edible plants found in the regions of the Southeastern Asia. In the current project, we propose to establish a concise and safe evaluation system that is able to rapidly screen our plant sample library for discovery of novel antiviral agents that can be used as both preventative and therapeutic measurements for combating emerging and re-emerging viruses.
