ABSTRACT
Serum pharmacochemistry of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) is an effective method to rapidly screen the effective substances and reveal the compatibility law of compound by identification and analysis of constituents migrating to blood after oral administration. In the last two decades, it has been universally accepted and widely applied in the field. With the cross-fusion with other disciplines, such as serum pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, metabolomics, network pharmacology and systems biology, serum pharmacochemistry shows comprehensive superiority in explaining drug changes in vivo and in vitro, interactions between drugs, interactions between drug and body, which coincides with the complexity of TCM compatibility, multi-components, multi-targets and multi-mechanisms. Based on the references related with the serum pharmacochemistry from CNKI scholar and Pubmed in 2013-2016, the research results of serum pharmacochemistry were statistically analyzed, and the key technical problems during the study of serum pharmacochemistry, for example, preparation of test sample, selection of experimental animal, determination of drug delivery scheme, method and time of the adoption blood, preparation and pretreatment of blood sample, as well as analysis of constituents migrating to blood, and the solving ways were empirically introduced. In addition, the development and comprehensive application of serum pharmacochemistry in TCM were summarized in this paper, hoping to lay a foundation for the further application of this method in TCM research.