Network pharmacology: a new approach to unveiling Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has thousandsyears of history in using herbal formulae (Fang-Ji in Chinese) that consist of many medicinal herbs for holistic treatment of various disorders. Due to the complex nature rooted in both medicinal herbs and human body, the mechanisms of actions for most TCMs remain unclear, especially for those clinically effective herbal formulae. With the advent of the big data era in the biomedical and biopharmaceutical research and development, network pharmacology is coming as a systematic approach to shifting the current “one target, one drug” paradigm in drug discovery and development. The network pharmacology approach is capable of describing complex interactions among biological systems, drugs, and diseases from a network perspective, sharing a similar holistic thinking of TCM. Bringing together the ancient and evolving TCM and the newly developed network pharmacology gives birth to an exciting new interdisciplinary frontier, termed TCM network pharmacology (TCM-NP), which would promote TCM research and development in a systematic fashion. Among leading investigators in the field, Prof. Shao Li at