The New Medicine System and Translational Medicine
新医药学与转化医学

In this perspective paper the authors introduced the background, goals and roadmap of translational medicine, addressed the difference and progressive trend of eastern medicine and western medicine, and then discussed the development and prospect of the new medicine system. The advantages of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM) lie in its guidelines based on holism and Systems theory, its methodology based on the balance of the body system as well as that of the human and the nature, and its personalized treatment with TCM formulas. But modernization of TCM still faces some challenges: how to translate the closed system of TCM into an open system; how to achieve the combination, integration and fusion of TCM and other modern science and technology; how to implement the scientific model, methodology and modern achievements in the study of TCM, interpreting it with data instead of words. There are much difference between eastern medicine and western medicine, but the trend of complementary development and integration of each other is irresistible. We should try to push the progress of the combination, integration and convergence of eastern medicine and western medicine to welcome the emergence of new medicine in 21 century. The development of new medicine system may have some requirements and characteristics as follows: firstly, it requires a model of system-system interaction of drug system and biological system; secondly, it requires a comprehensive clinical diagnosis system taking both disease and syndrome into account, including some quantitative indicators of syndrome based on Chinese medicine, some pathological indicators of biochemical and imaging based western medicine, and some biomarkers such as genes, proteins, metabolites based on the discovery of systems biology; thirdly, it requires a clinical treatment patterns based on parallelism of formula-disease-syndrome; fourthly, it requires an R&D model of Beside-Bench-Beside; fifthly, the study of the drug system and human system requires combination of overall characterization and specific characterization as well as combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis.