The National Center for Drug Screening, located in Shanghai's Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, has established 65 drug screening models with a daily screening capacity of more than 20,000 samples.
The center's species library will cover more than 50,000 kinds of compounds by the end of this year, containing more than 4,000 kinds of exclusive Chinese herbal compounds, said the paper.
Screening compound libraries, which helps discover those chemical substances with special medical functions, are an initialand vital step for drug development, according to experts with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
China's lack of advanced drug screening technologies and equipment means that its pharmaceutical industry has had to focus on imitating foreign products.
The center got approval and financial support in 1997 from China's Ministry of Science and Technology and Shanghai Municipality, and started operating on a trial basis in January 2001.
(Xinhua News Agency March 26, 2003)
