Research Status and Development Trends of Network Pharmacology in Chinese Medicine

Background: The increasing demand for Chinese medicine resources has piqued the scientific community’s interest in modernizing the Chinese medicine industry. However, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is based on the "multiple targets and multiple components" treatment modality and involves unique treatment methods, such as "same disease with different treatments" and "treating different diseases with same method." Hence, it is difficult to elucidate the mechanisms of TCM formulations. Network pharmacology enables the analysis of the characteristics of "multiple components, multiple targets, and multiple pathways," which is consistent with the overall characteristics of TCM. Hence, network pharmacology analysis can be used to examine the active ingredients, mechanism of action, and compatibility rules of TCM, consequently providing a scientific basis for the theories of TCM. Results: : Network pharmacology is a new pharmacological research method that can quickly predict the pharmacological action mechanism of TCMs. Compared with traditional pharmacological research, this method does not require complicated TCM extraction and long-term experimental verification, is fast and efficient, but has certain errors. Combined with multi-omics methods, it can reduce the error while shortening the experiment time, and it can be used in the analysis of the mechanism of action and compatibility of TCM quickly and efficiently. In addition, the application of this method in reverse pharmacology is helpful for the development of new Chinese medicines for specific diseases. In our article, we briefly summarize the commonly used databases and software and calculation methods, and pay more attention to the combination of multi-omics and TCM. At the same time, we also summarize the mechanism of single prescription, compound prescriptions, "same disease with different treatments and treating different diseases with the same method" in TCM, reverse pharmacology of TCM. Conclusions: : Network pharmacology has unique advantages to active ingredients, compatibility rules, and mechanisms of action explorations of TCMs. Using network pharmacology to clarify the mechanism of TCM can enhance the global acceptance of TCM products and promote the modernization and international development of the TCM industry, as well as providing a scientific basis for the law of compatibility of TCM.