Functional foods, natural product are more exposed in therapeutics. They are complex compared to current pharmaceutical drugs, therefore the molecular mechanisms and therapeutic effects are more complicated to understand.
The projects aims to develop an informatics system that collects relevant scientific data on herbal medicine, functional foods (plants). 1. The database provides a chemical description of plants (chemical structures, analytical chemical results), allows similarity studies of the plants based on their chemical composition. 2. In addition, the affected molecular pathways are included, and molecular mechanisms are studied, modeled or analysed in the context of the experimental results. 3.Finally, traditional and clinical data are also added to the database to uncover the mechanism of action of a particular plant.
The projects main goal is to serve pharmaceutical industry, food research and cosmetics where natural/crude products are mostly used, or analysed. Providing a detailed catalogue with understandable information about currently available natural/plant derived products to non professionals is also a goal.
The project attempts to focus on aspects of chronic diseases, which are often unresponsive to current therapeutics and warn for more sofisticated approaches, more complex products even affecting genetic expression patterns.