Traditional Chinese medicine has taken a new step towards the global market.

Kanglaite injection, an anti-cancer Chinese traditional medicine, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States to be used for clinical human experiment, according to sources with the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

This is the first time that a traditional Chinese medicine has been approved for clinic experiment in the United States, the sources said.

Last month, the injection, invented by Zhejiang Kanglaite Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, went through a four-month clinical experiment on 15 to 18 volunteers in a hospital located in Salt Lake City, Utah in the United States.

All the data will be studied and analyzed before new rounds of experiments are allowed to start and before it is licensed for sale, according to Li Dapeng, the medicine's researcher.

The first group of people who received the injection as part of the clinical experiment have showed satisfactory results, and the medicine is considered effective and safe, said Li.

Kanglaite injection is developed from the liquid distilled from the seeds of Job's tears, which is a kind of herbal medicine.

It is targeted to effectively kill cancer cells while upgrading the immune capacity of the human body.

In China, the medicine has been used in thousands of clinical experiments and by more than 200,000 tumor patients. The results show that the medicine is effective in its anti-cancer actions and has no apparent side effects.

The active compound, production techniques and prescriptions of the medicine have received patent certificates in countries like the United States, Japan and the European Union.

The medicine enjoys the largest sales volume among Western and traditional Chinese anti-cancer medicines in China.

Despite China's long history of the use of traditional Chinese medicines, the country's export volume of them accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's sales volume of traditional Chinese medicine.

(China Daily 07/09/2001)