LAUSR

Dear Editors and Researchers in China, Thank you for the comments and reminders on our research. We hope our research result could shine a light on the treatment of interstitial cystitis (IC) and help this group of patients. And we are also very excited to know that your team has noticed the potential therapeutic effect of Bletilla striata on IC as well. In this study, we obtained B. striata extract solution from tubers of B. striata. The tuber of B. striata contains a variety of active ingredients of which the main ingredient is polysaccharides. These active ingredients have been shown to exhibit anti‐ inflammatory, antioxidant, immunomodulatory, antifibrosis, wound healing, and hemostatic effects, as we elaborated in our article.3–5 The main focus of this study is to show the therapeutic effect of B. striata on IC instead of identifying exact active ingredients which lead to our experimental results, so we did not put effort into purifying polysaccharides or other possible effective ingredients of B. striata. We were also afraid to exclude ingredients that might be essential for such positive therapeutic effects which would mislead research results and this Chinese medicine. We hoped we could retain the main ingredients and other effective ingredients that might not have been clearly documented as much as possible. The polysaccharides in B. striata are soluble in water, so we used distilled water for extraction in this experiment. Since now we have shown B. striata's therapeutic effect on IC, we hope in the future we or other researchers can explore which active ingredients are responsible for the effects we see in our research, and by doing so, better therapeutic results might be achieved. We have manufacturers extracted from B. striata tubers directly instead of using commercially available Chinese medicines which contain excipients although they are usually quantified. After extraction of B. striata tubers as described in our article, the extract was freeze‐dried into powder which was used in our experiment.