Department of Natural Medicinal Chemistry team have six members, they are Prof. Qingwen Shi, Prof. Changhong Huo, Prof. Ligeng Li, Prof. Manli Zhang, Asso. Prof. Yibing Wu and Assistant Prof. Yufang Wang.

The courses of our group undertaken include: Natural Medicinal Chemistry, Chemistry of Chinese Materia Medica, General Introduction of Pharmacy, Modernization of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Spectroscopy and its Application, Large Instrument Platform-Introduction of NMR, NMI and X-Ray, Organic Analysis and Stereochemistry，et al.

Our research interests are in the general area of Natural Medicinal Chemistry: discovery of bioactive natural products and studies on their metabolites in vivo. Our works focus on Chinese endemic plants to find compounds with unique structures by means of extraction, isolation and purification, and identified the planar and three-dimensional structures of the compounds by NMR, UV, IR, MS, CD and X-Ray techniques, bio-assay in vivo and in vitro, structural modification and structure-activity relationship studies are also conducted.

At present, cancer is a secondary serious threat to human health and life. Searching for novel anti-cancer chemicals with definite curative effect, clear mechanism of action, high cure rate and tolerated toxic and side effects is a challenge for the scientific workers all over the world. During the long evolutionary process, plants have synthesized many secondary metabolites with great variety of structures, potential biological activities, even have new mechanisms. It has been a hot topic and research focus for pharmacologists and chemists to find high-efficient and low-toxic anti-cancer chemicals from the nature, including plants, microorganisms and marine source. Taxol, vincristine, and camptothecin are good examples of excellent natural anti-cancer drugs found in plants, which have been widely used in clinical practice. All these have greatly encouraged our team to exploit the new anti-cancer drugs from natural source. 

Natural medicines work in the form of themselves or a variety of metabolites in the body. Sesquiterpene lactones are a large class of chemical components with rich skeleton structure and various biological activities in nature. Their metabolites have distinctive structures and are rich in sulfur atoms, these results suggest that a new mechanism of action may play a role in pharmacological activity. Our team also focused on natural sesquiterpene lactones, especially unsaturated sesquiterpene lactones, from which to find the active components and their active metabolites. It will provide a new perspective to reveal the mechanism of bioactive sesquiterpenes and provides a basis for the more rational application of these compounds and natural medicines.

More than 100 peer reviewed papers were published in Chem. Rev., Org. Lett., J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commu., J. Nat. Prod., Phytochemistry, Food Chemistry, J. Agric. Food Chem., Food Res. Int.,  Anal. Bioanal. Chem., Eur. J. Org. Chem., Planta Medica, Tetrahedron, Tetrahedron Lett., Curr. Org. Chem., Biosci. Biotichnol. Biochem., Pharm. Biol., Helv. Chim. Acta, Z. Naturforsch., Chem. Biodiv., et al.