Network Pharmacology: A New Approach for Chinese Herbal Medicine Research

open access

 Introduction

Over the past decades, drug discovery has followed the dominant paradigm of the “one gene, one drug, one disease” and mainly focused on designing exquisitely selective ligands which could avoid side effects [1]. However, owing to the lack of efficacy and safety, the clinical attrition rate of new drug candidates reached up to 30% [2]. Moreover, the large-scale functional genomics studies have revealed that many single-gene knockouts exhibit little effect on the phenotype [3], and only 34% of single-gene knockout resulted in sickness or lethality [4]. Systems biology is a recent trend in bioscience research which focuses on the complex interactions in biological systems from a holistic perspective, rather than altering the single molecular component [5, 6]. Network pharmacology [7, 8], a system biology-based methodology, replaces the corollary of rational drug design of “magic bullets” by the search for multitarget drugs that act on biological networks as “magic shotguns” [9]. Network biology analysis has also revealed that the deletion of individual nodes has little effect on the disease networks [10]. The increased understanding of the role of network biology systems challenges the dominant assumption of single-target drug discovery [11, 12]. Chinese herbal medicines (CHM) include natural medicines that were discovered by the ancient Chinese and evolved through at least 3000 years of uninterrupted clinical practice. Generally, CHM cures diseases by the synergistic effects of multiple compounds and herbal formula, which is mainly based on the integrative and holistic ways [13]. However, with the growing popularity and great promise of CHM, the ever-increasing demand for illuminating pharmacological mechanisms, potential drug efficacy, and clinical toxicity are major issues that need to be addressed. As a methodology and technology, network pharmacology offers a new approach to integrate the notion of drug discovery based on comprehensive research and synthetic assessment. Obviously, this principle coincides with the characteristics of syndrome differentiation by traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and holistic view of CHM treatment [14]................