ABSTRACT
In traditional Chinese medicine(TCM),abnormal and diseased conditions have been defined as Zheng Hou, a unique disease definition system in the context of holism. For over 3000 years the main clinical treatment method for TCM therapeutics has been so called Fang-ji, a TCM medicinal formula usually composed of several herbs and medical materials. The compositions of Fang-ji are based on the clinical practice under the guidelines of "bian-zheng-lun-zhi" and the principles of "Jun-chen-zuo-shi". Each Zheng is treated with a correspondingly-individualized Fang-ji.The modern approach to the study of Fang-ji pharmacology,however,has been focusing on the isolation and identification of individual active components for cellular and molecular targets. Although this approach has led to the development of many new monomers purified from Fang-ji as new drugs widely used in clinical practice such as the an-timalarial artemsinin,which has earned a Nobel Prize,the pharmacological bases of these purified effective monomers or active components have lost the TCM characteristics and are far different from the phar-macological theory and clinical applications of Fang-ji,in terms of the principles of"bian-zheng-lun-zhi"and "Jun-chen-zuo-shi". Here we introduce the emerging pharmacophenophenics as a systematical paradigm for the pharmacological study of Fang-ji.Pharmacophenomics studies the orchestrated multi-target pharmacology of combination therapy.With well-defined molecular mechanisms of Zheng Hou at the level of multi-omics and a suite of new phenomics technologies and platforms, the pharmacophe-nomics may be used to characterize the drug-response phenome of Fang-ji and to identify the corre-sponding multiple therapeutic targets according to the TCM theory of Jun-chen-zuo-shi.Pharmacophe-nomic study of Fang-ji will also lay a theoretical foundation for the new science of precision medicine.