Brief Bioinform. 2014 Sep;15(5):710-33. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbt035. Epub 2013 Jun 3.
Systems pharmacology is an emerging field that integrates systems biology and pharmacology to advance the process of drug discovery, development and the understanding of therapeutic mechanisms. The aim of the present work is to highlight the role that the systems pharmacology plays across the traditional herbal medicines discipline, which is exemplified by a case study of botanical drugs applied in the treatment of depression. First, based on critically examined pharmacology and clinical knowledge, we propose a large-scale statistical analysis to evaluate the efficiency of herbs used in traditional medicines. Second, we focus on the exploration of the active ingredients and targets by carrying out complex structure-, omics- and network-based systematic investigations. Third, specific informatics methods are developed to infer drug-disease connections, with purpose to understand how drugs work on the specific targets and pathways. Finally, we propose a new systems pharmacology method, which is further applied to an integrated platform (Herbal medicine Systems Pharmacology) of blended herbal medicine and omics data sets, allowing for the systematization of current and traditional knowledge of herbal medicines and, importantly, for the application of this emerging body of knowledge to the development of new drugs for complex human diseases.
系统药理学是一个新兴领域，它将系统生物学和药理学相结合，以推进药物发现、开发和治疗机制理解的进程。本工作的目的是强调系统药理学在传统草药学科中的作用，以应用于治疗抑郁症的植物药物的案例研究为例。首先，基于经过严格审查的药理学和临床知识，我们提出了一种大规模的统计分析方法，以评估传统药物中使用的草药的功效。其次，我们专注于通过进行复杂的结构、组学和网络系统研究来探索活性成分和靶标。第三，开发了特定的信息学方法来推断药物-疾病联系，目的是了解药物如何在特定靶标和途径上发挥作用。最后，我们提出了一种新的系统药理学方法，进一步应用于草药和组学数据集的集成平台（草药系统药理学），允许对草药的当前和传统知识进行系统化，并且重要的是，将这一新的知识体系应用于开发治疗复杂人类疾病的新药。
