The clinical application of Chinese herbal medicine should be based on syndrome differentiation in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and the pharmacological evaluation of herbal medicine in new drug discovery should be also based on the TCM syndrome differentiation. To clarify the Chinese herbal characteristics and mechanisms of action through pharmacological experiments is not only the inevitable requirement for Chinese herb modernization and internationalization, but also the key way to direct the clinical rational administration. Thus how to characterize the syndrome type in commonly used animal disease models becomes the key issue in pharmacological evaluation. Following the development of biomedicine, one important way to clarify the syndrome characteristics of animal disease model in the pharmacological evaluation is to compare the differences between the responsive and non-responsive animals, and to find out the responsiveness-related biocharacteristics. An important approach to set up the Chinese herbal pharmacological evaluation which is suitable for Chinese medicine differentiation is to utilize the method of surveying syndrome type with Chinese herb formula and select the responsive animal model to reflect certain syndrome type, and furthermore to clear up the syndrome characteristics of the animal model by investigating its modern biological basis and establishing the correct indications of special TCM syndrome type. This pharmacological evaluation way based on finding out the responsiveness-related biocharacteristics of herbal medicine could become more effective in evaluating drug effects, further improving the new drug discovery, and developing Chinese herbal medicine.

Key words: Chinese herbal drugs, Treatment effectiveness, Syndrome, Models, Animal