Active compounds and molecular targets of Chinese herbal medicine for neurogenesis in stroke treatment: Implication for cross talk between Traditional Chinese Medicine and Biomedical Sciences

Neural stem/progenitor cells (NSCs) could be attractive therapeutic targets for promoting adult neurogenesis, brain plasticity, and repair in stroke and neurodegenerative diseases, raising great potentials for regeneration therapy. In adult ischemic brains, NSCs have limited capacities of growth, differentiation, and generating new neurons for repairing the damaged central nervous system. However, the spontaneous brain repair seems to be insufficient to recover neurological deficits in most stroke cases. To overcome those problems, pharmacological manipulations targeting on endogenous NSCs or transplanted stem cells could be a promoting strategy for regeneration therapy. Chinese herbal medicine has great potentials for developing novel therapeutic strategies for adult neurogenesis and brain repair in poststroke treatment. Chinese herbal medicine has a long history for poststroke treatment. Recent studies create great opportunity for drug discovery for promoting neurogenesis and improving the recovery of neurological functions in poststroke treatment. Many active compounds or extracts from medicinal herbs have shown promising effects on regulating proliferation, self-renewal and differentiation of NSCs, and promoting neural network formation as well as neurological functional recovery with in vitro and in vivo experimental evidence. Therefore, targeting neural stem/progenitor cells can be an important opportunity for the studies of Traditional Chinese Medicine in regeneration medicine. Due to the complex interactions of herbal ingredients in network regulation, huge challenge remains to be resolved for further study.