Traditional Chinese Medicine-Based Network Pharmacology Could Lead to New Multicompound Drug Discovery

Figure 1

A diagram of drug discovery based on TCM-based network pharmacology. Each circle or diamond represents one gene or protein. Functionally interconnected genes or proteins are grouped by bioinformatics and shown in different colors. The biological networks in a disease include the general biological network of the disease (middle part) and TCM pattern network of the disease (Pattern (A) and (B) as an example). The shared disease biological networks and TCM pattern networks are shown in different colors. Drug A and drug B (in lower part) is targeting to the general biological network of the disease and molecular network of TCM pattern (A) and (B) in the disease respectively, and thus the drug A could be good for the disease with TCM pattern (A) and drug B could be good for the disease with pattern (B).