Network Pharmacology and Systems Biology in Drug Discovery

Abstract

The rationale of the drug design method is generally focused on the designing of “magic bullets” that acts on individual drug targets. This idea of “one gene, one target, one disease” prejudiced many aspects of drug discovery strategy especially for the complex diseases. Many of the drugs give their pharmacological action by targeting multiple proteins rather than targeting single protein. This phenomenon of designing new leads that target multiple proteins provided new wings in the drug discovery process. Network pharmacology is a system biology-based methodology tool to discover the concept based on “multiple targets, multiple effects, complex diseases.” This methodology helps to discover new entities that act on multiple targets and replaces “magic bullets” by “magic shotguns.” In this chapter, we highlighted importance of network pharmacology method in drug discovery process. With this we also summarized the process of developing network pharmacology (data collection to network generation), applications, limitations, and future prospective of network pharmacology approaches.