Abstract
The scientific understanding of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been hindered by the lack of methods that can explore the complex nature and combinatorial rules of herbal formulae. On the assumption that herbal ingredients mainly target a molecular network to adjust the imbalance of human body, here we present a-self-developed TCM network pharmacology platform for discovering herbal formulae in a systematic manner. This platform integrates a set of network-based methods that we established previously to catch the network regulation mechanism and to identify active ingredients as well as synergistic combinations for a given herbal formula. We then provided a case study on an antirheumatoid arthritis (RA) formula, Qing-Luo-Yin (QLY), to demonstrate the usability of the platform. We revealed the target network of QLY against RA-related key processes including angiogenesis, inflammatory response, and immune response, based on which we not only predicted active and synergistic ingredients from QLY but also interpreted the combinatorial rule of this formula. These findings are either verified by the literature evidence or have the potential to guide further experiments. Therefore, such a network pharmacology strategy and platform is expected to make the systematical study of herbal formulae achievable and to make the TCM drug discovery predictable.
Highlights
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a whole medical system deriving from thousands of years of clinical application that has evolved independently from or parallel to allopathic conventional medicine and has been considered as one of the main items of the complementary or alternative medical system [1, 2]
As the beginning of TCM network pharmacology, we proposed the possible relationship between TCM and molecular networks in 1999 [13] and established a network-based herbal formulae research framework illustrated by a networkbased case study on Cold/Hot herbal formulae and Hot/Cold syndromes in 2007 [14, 15]
To address the challenges in the study of the molecular basis and combinatorial principle of herbal formulae, we developed a network-based integrative strategy to provide a unified framework as a platform for TCM network pharmacology (Figure 1)
Summary
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a whole medical system deriving from thousands of years of clinical application that has evolved independently from or parallel to allopathic conventional medicine and has been considered as one of the main items of the complementary or alternative medical system [1, 2]. With the recent advent of high-throughput technologies, experimental analyses of the active ingredients screening and the mechanisms of action of herbal formulae have become increasingly various. Investigators often examine a herbal formula from different facets by combining chemical or metabolic fingerprint [5, 6], pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic technology [7, 8], and genomic, proteomic or metabolomics analyses [9,10,11]. Herbal formulae with numerous chemical compounds are too complex to be examined solely by conventional experimental approaches. A herbal formula contains hundreds of chemical compounds and its therapeutic effects are mainly produced by complex interactions among ingredients [12]. The dearth of modern methods in TCM study and deconvolution of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine complexity of TCM urgently requires new strategies and appropriate approaches
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