Artificial intelligence and big data have taken Chinese medicine research to a new height, freed it from the metaphysical fetters, allowing Chinese and Western medicine to blend in seamlessly and outshine the shadow of death, especially during a global pandemic like the COVID-19, and find the key to the future of better health and longer life for mankind.

Perhaps it is only when life is at its most dangerous juncture that life-saving secrets from the past are rediscovered and novel technologies and products are developed. As COVID-19 devastates our world and many critically ill patients fall into despair, with Western medicine failing to save lives and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) instead coming in aid of the people, it is perhaps time to seriously consider and aggressively pursue the integration of Chinese and Western medicine to prevent and treat certain diseases and preserve health.

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Although the mission of both Chinese and Western Medicine is to prevent and cure diseases, their approaches and philosophies have been different scientifically. For instance, while Chinese medicine emphasizes personal and customized treatment and stresses the importance of disease prevention and keeping healthy, Western medicine is mostly developed based on scientific proof obtained from clinical trials of a large number of people. The objective remains the same, but the approaches are quite different.

Perhaps due to a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of each approach, the East and the West have begun to meet and collaborate within the medical field. For instance, the US and other governments have recognized and approved the use of certain TCMs and their derived chemicals as well as practices such as acupuncture.

President Xi Jinping has been most supportive of modernizing and globalizing the use of TCM. “The country should carry on fine elements in traditional Chinese Medicine and innovate them,” Xi said recently, stressing that TCM is a treasure of Chinese civilization embodying the wisdom of the nation and its people over the past several thousand years. He also underlined TCM’s important role in building a “Healthy China”. His instruction was delivered at a national conference on TCM held in Beijing in October 2019.

The coronavirus pandemic is the best time to pursue big data and make more summary on the efficacy of “digitalization” of medication. Intelligent medical institutions such as micro medicine can also participate in the research of these cases

I was inspired several decades ago by the ground-breaking research of Professor Tu Youyou, who developed artemisini and dihydroartemisinin after discovering Artermisia – a Chinese herb from ancient Chinese medical literature – and used them to treat malaria, resulting in a major breakthrough of the twentieth-century tropical medicine and saving millions of lives in China, Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. In the early 1980s, my colleagues at Texas Medical Center and I used this strategy to identify a chemical extracted from another well-known TCM (Ligusticum striatum 川芎) to prevent and treat stroke as well as other neurological and ophthalmological diseases (D. Baskin and D. Lam, U.S. Patent no. 4859674; G. Chiou and D. Lam, U.S. Patent no. 4865599; New York Times, 1989.09.23).

Interestingly, the recent emergence of artificial intelligence and big data promise to promote TCM research and development to an unforeseen level, as well as to amalgamate Western medicine with Chinese medicine. If powerful new Western-style drugs based on TCM could be discovered by the afore-demonstrated random search of old Chinese literature, one can imagine how systematic and scientific search and analyses of thousands of known TCMs using novel tools such as artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing can lead to new breakthroughs in finding countless novel preventives and therapeutics against many diseases!

The coronavirus pandemic is the best time to pursue big data and make more summary on the efficacy of “digitalization” of medication. Intelligent medical institutions such as micro medicine can also participate in the research of these cases.

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AI may also be a powerful tool to discover novel uses for existing Western pharmaceuticals, and, hence, can provide a much more expedient and less costly avenue of new drug discovery. Many such examples already exist often serendipitously. AI can greatly accelerate and quantify this process. For instance, a few days ago, preliminary studies using a widely available steroid drug dexamethasone suggested that it might be helpful in treating certain very sick COVID-19 patients in the hospital who require ventilation or oxygen. The systemic analysis of examples like this is likely to be expedited and quantified by the assistance of AI.

As humans are living longer, it is imperative that they are also living healthier. The amalgamation of Chinese and Western Medicine promises bringing good health and longevity to an unprecedented level in the history of mankind.