Over the past decades, aerobic endurance exercise has been potently highlighted concerning its significance in clinical amelioration of many disease symptoms, such as glucose metabolism in type 2 diabetes, dyslipidemia in atherosclerosis and hypertension in stroke, acute myocardial infarction or cardiac insufficiency. Nevertheless, the inability to afford definite intensity of physical exercise has been always the obstacle to make profits of exercises.

Discovery of active agents that would mimic the reprogramming metabolism induced by exercise training is thus one of the effective strategies to overcome these obstacles.

Researchers from Dr. XU Shen’s group and Dr.Hu Lihong’s group from SIMM together firstly discovered that artigenin could mimic exercise training effects and efficiently enhance mice endurance. Researchers extracts the artigenin from Arctium,the fruit of burdock, which is a kind of vegetable rich in Japan and Jiangsu Province of China.Burdock is of high nutritional value and comparable with ginseng. 

In this study, the researchers discovered that arctigenin could efficiently promote mitochondrial biogenesis and fatty acid synthesis and oxidation in vitro and in vivo, subsequently leading to the mice treadmill endurance enhancement. The results has been published online (PLOS ONE, 2011, 6(8): e24224).The related findings have been applied for Chinese patent.