Folding fan mode counter-current chromatography offers fast blind screening for drug discovery. Case study: finding anti-enterovirus 71 agents from Anemarrhena asphodeloides.

A new application of counter-current chromatography (CCC) in drug discovery, called folding fan mode (FFM), is designed to eliminate the extensive and time-consuming calculation of the partition coefficients of some preset compounds in conventional CCC separation. Careful reading of reports in the literature reveals that, when two-phase solvent systems are listed in a polarity-increasing sequence, the isolates also show a similar trend in polarity. The relationship between the two-phase solvent system and the isolates is like that between the folds and the picture of a folding fan.