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Review
. 2023 Nov 8;18(1):146.
doi: 10.1186/s13020-023-00853-2.

Network pharmacology: a bright guiding light on the way to explore the personalized precise medication of traditional Chinese medicine

Ling Li #  1   2 , Lele Yang #  3   4 , Liuqing Yang  5 , Chunrong He  5 , Yuxin He  5 , Liping Chen  6   7 , Qin Dong  5 , Huaiying Zhang  6 , Shiyun Chen  5 , Peng Li  8
Affiliations
Review

Network pharmacology: a bright guiding light on the way to explore the personalized precise medication of traditional Chinese medicine

Ling Li et al. Chin Med. .

Abstract

Network pharmacology can ascertain the therapeutic mechanism of drugs for treating diseases at the level of biological targets and pathways. The effective mechanism study of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) characterized by multi-component, multi-targeted, and integrative efficacy, perfectly corresponds to the application of network pharmacology. Currently, network pharmacology has been widely utilized to clarify the mechanism of the physiological activity of TCM. In this review, we comprehensively summarize the application of network pharmacology in TCM to reveal its potential of verifying the phenotype and underlying causes of diseases, realizing the personalized and accurate application of TCM. We searched the literature using "TCM network pharmacology" and "network pharmacology" as keywords from Web of Science, PubMed, Google Scholar, as well as Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure in the last decade. The origins, development, and application of network pharmacology are closely correlated with the study of TCM which has been applied in China for thousands of years. Network pharmacology and TCM have the same core idea and promote each other. A well-defined research strategy for network pharmacology has been utilized in several aspects of TCM research, including the elucidation of the biological basis of diseases and syndromes, the prediction of TCM targets, the screening of TCM active compounds, and the decipherment of mechanisms of TCM in treating diseases. However, several factors limit its application, such as the selection of databases and algorithms, the unstable quality of the research results, and the lack of standardization. This review aims to provide references and ideas for the research of TCM and to encourage the personalized and precise use of Chinese medicine.

Keywords: Application; Network pharmacology; Precision treatment; Research strategy; Traditional Chinese medicine.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The timeline of major milestones for the development history of network pharmacology A. The number of papers published in the field of network pharmacology in CNKI B and WOS C. Reproduced from Ref [1, 3, 17, 23, 24]
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The network of different categories. Protein–protein interaction networks whose nodes are protein (A). Compound-target-signaling pathway networks are composed of compound nodes, protein nodes, and signaling pathway nodes (B)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Schematic diagram of the utilization strategy of network pharmacology in TCM research
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Human disease networks and endotyping disease clusters. Human disease networks (A); endotyping disease clusters (B). Reproduced from Ref. [24]
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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