ABSTRACT
The traditional approaches of pharmacokinetics (PK) focused on the dynamic changing process of single or several effective components of drugs in vivo,which was noted as limitations for the complexity studies on PK of multicomponent herbal medicine featuring multi-component,multi-target and multi-effect.It was turned into a bottleneck in the modernization process of traditional Chinese medicine,which could have made misunderstanding of pharmacological and toxicological knowledge of Chinese herbal medicine and its combination drugs.Owing to the advanced high-throughput platforms and various big data mining technology,metabolomics was capable for simultaneously detecting and depicting the variations of hundreds or even thousands of small molecules offering new opportunities for the PK studies on some complicated components.This review summarized recent PK studies over multicomponent drugs and chiefly introduced two remarkable applications to metabolomics in pharmacokinetics research,Chinmedomics and Poly-PK,integrating the theories of both metabolomics and traditional PK.The challenges and strengths of the two new strategies were also expounded.