Another Taiwanese firm looking to Chinese herbal medicines is U-Vision Biotech Inc (微晶生技). The firm believes new tools made available through the information-technology revolution have enabled biotech to move forward, and they hope to find drug targets within the vast area of Chinese herbal medicine. Changing laws are also fueling this move toward herbal medicines, according to Eric Tzeng (曾驥孟), president of U-Vision.
"Now [government regulators] are moving away from emphasizing only one single compound and allow you to have a mixture. They want you to identify the structure and the properties of individual natural compounds -- they have changed the FDA [US Food and Drug Administration] guidelines for botanical drug products. So now everybody has the potential to find good [drug targets] from herbal medicine," he said.
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