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Challenges and Perspectives in Target Identification and Mechanism Illustration for Chinese Medicine

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Abstract

Chinese medicine (CM) is an important resource for human life understanding and discovery of drugs. However, due to the unclear pharmacological mechanism caused by unclear target, research and international promotion of many active components have made little progress in the past decades of years. CM is mainly composed of multi-ingredients with multi-targets. The identification of targets of multiple active components and the weight analysis of multiple targets in a specific pathological environment, that is, the determination of the most important target is the main obstacle to the mechanism clarification and thus hinders its internationalization. In this review, the main approach to target identification and network pharmacology were summarized. And BIBm (Bayesian inference modeling), a powerful method for drug target identification and key pathway determination was introduced. We aim to provide a new scientific basis and ideas for the development and international promotion of new drugs based on CM.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Life Science and Technology, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, 650500, China

    Xiao-xi Guo, Su An, Fan Bao & Tian-rui Xu

  2. The First People’s Hospital of Yunnan Province, Kunming, 650032, China

    Fan Bao

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  1. Xiao-xi Guo
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  2. Su An
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Contributions

Xu TR conceived and designed the study; Guo XX drafted the manuscript and drew the charts; An S and Bao F took care of the writing-revision and editing. All authors have contributed and critically reviewed the manuscript and approved the final version. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tian-rui Xu.

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The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.

Supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Nos. 81960659, 81760264, 81960394), Applied Basic Research Key Project of Yunnan (202001AS070024), and Yunnan Applied Basic Research Projects-Union foundation Management System (No. 2018FE001(-294))

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Guo, Xx., An, S., Bao, F. et al. Challenges and Perspectives in Target Identification and Mechanism Illustration for Chinese Medicine. Chin. J. Integr. Med. 29, 644–654 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11655-023-3629-9

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