Research progress on effective compounds group of Chinese materia medica / 中草药

ABSTRACT

Effective compounds group of Chinese materia medica (CMM) is a pharmacological active compounds group containing all components that are closely related to their clinical application. It plays a core role in CMM formula. We think it maintains not only the characteristics of the whole system and the system integrity of CMM formula, but also their chemical compositions are clear. However, due to the complexity of CMM, the successful research cases are very few. In this paper, we summarized several outstanding research cases of effective compounds group in recent years and there are three strategies, including "research on decomposed-combined recipes of CMM based on assessment of chemical components in CMM way", "screening the effective components group based on knock-in and knock-out from chromatographic fingerprint", and "screening the effective components group based on serum pharmacochemistry". We also summarized the ways to illustrate properties of effective compounds group, such as combination of multiple component, clear chemical composition, and system integrity. This paper provided ideas for the future research of effective components of CMM.