From 2000 to 2004, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) accepted 1 171 applications and funded 160 projects for fundamental research on integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine. The success rate is 13.64%. Being supported by NSFC, a number of achievements well known in China and abroad have been made, such as acupuncture complementary anaesthesia, treatment of leukemia, viral hepatitis, cardio-cerebrovascular diseases, acute abdomen, burns and fracture with integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine and their therapeutic mechanisms, and some new concepts and theories have been put forward, such as the theories of activating blood to resolve stagnation, simultaneous treatment of bacteria and toxin, etc. But there still exit some problems in the research of the funded projects. The research ways are mainly combination of different methods instead of integration of both traditional Chinese and Western medicine. The research results are mainly confirmation of traditional Chinese medical theories instead of exploration of their innate regularities. The relationship among disease, syndrome and symptom is not clearly explored. The principal-subordinate relationship between macro- and micro-differentiation of syndromes is not clear. Academic research is short of new ideas. Improper or biased explanation of the theories of traditional Chinese medicine still exists. On analysis of above problems, some preferable aspects of projects for fundamental research on integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine funded by NSFC in future are suggested in this article.

Objective: This study was devoted to identifying natural thrombin inhibitors from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and evaluating its biological activity in vitro and binding characteristics. Methods: A combination strategy containing molecular docking, thrombin inhibition assay, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and molecular dynamics simulation were applied to verify the study result. Results: Gallic acid was confirmed as a direct thrombin inhibitor with IC