Open AccessA survey of web resources and tools for the study of TCM network pharmacology
Author(s) -
Zhao Jing,
Yang Jian,
Tian Saisai,
Zhang Weidong
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
quantitative biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.707
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 2095-4697
pISSN - 2095-4689
DOI - 10.1007/s40484-019-0167-8
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , systems pharmacology , computer science , traditional chinese medicine , mechanism (biology) , data science , biological network , medicine , pharmacology , drug , bioinformatics , alternative medicine , biology , paleontology , philosophy , epistemology , pathology
Background Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treats diseases in a holistic manner, while TCM formulae are multi‐component, multi‐target agents at the molecular level. Thus there are many parallels between the key ideas of TCM pharmacology and network pharmacology. These years, TCM network pharmacology has developed as an interdisciplinary of TCM science and network pharmacology, which studies the mechanism of TCM at the molecular level and in the context of biological networks. It provides a new research paradigm that can use modern biomedical science to interpret the mechanism of TCM, which is promising to accelerate the modernization and internationalization of TCM. Results In this paper we introduce state‐of‐the‐art free data sources, web servers and softwares that can be used in the TCM network pharmacology, including databases of TCM, drug targets and diseases, web servers for the prediction of drug targets, and tools for network and functional analysis. Conclusions This review could help experimental pharmacologists make better use of the existing data and methods in their study of TCM.