Patent ID: 8518712

Claim:
A method for discovering pharmacologically active substances from natural products, comprising: obtaining an activity profile by testing pharmacological activity of a plurality of samples which are natural products extracts, mixture thereof, or fractions of the natural products extracts; obtaining mass profiles based on mass spectra resulting from analysis of the samples by mass spectrometry; and determining molecular weight of pharmacologically active substances by comparing and analyzing the activity profile and the mass profile performed by comparison of correlation coefficients represented by Equation 1: C j = ∑ t = 1 N ⁢ ( a k 0 × m kj 0 ) 〈 Equation ⁢ ⁢ 1 〉 where j: j-th bin when the mass spectra is divided into bins with given mass intervals; a 0 k : normalized activity of k-th sample; m 0 kj : normalized intensity of a mass peak of he k-th sample at the j-th bin; and N: number of the samples.