ABSTRACT
Traditional Chinese medicine, as a complementary and alternative medicine, has been practiced for thousands of years in China and possesses remarkable clinical efficacy. Thus, systematic analysis and examination of the mechanistic links between Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) and the complex human body can benefit contemporary understandings by carrying out qualitative and quantitative analysis. With increasing attention, the approach of network pharmacology has begun to unveil the mystery of CHM by constructing the heterogeneous network relationship of "herb-compound-target-pathway," which corresponds to the holistic mechanisms of CHM. By integrating computational techniques into network pharmacology, the efficiency and accuracy of active compound screening and target fishing have been improved at an unprecedented pace. This review dissects the core innovations to the network pharmacology approach that were developed in the years since 2015 and highlights how this tool has been applied to understanding the coronavirus disease 2019 and refining the clinical use of CHM to combat it.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 Drug Treatment , Drugs, Chinese Herbal , Humans , Drugs, Chinese Herbal/pharmacology , Drugs, Chinese Herbal/therapeutic use , Network Pharmacology , Medicine, Chinese Traditional/methods , Treatment OutcomeABSTRACT
The outbreak and pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 has caused a severe public health burden and will challenge global health for the future. The discovery and mechanistic investigation of drugs against Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is in deadly demand. The paper published by Li and colleagues proposed the hypothesis that vitamin C combined with glycyrrhizic acid in treating COVID-19 and its mechanistic investigation was performed by a database-based network pharmacology. In this letter, we present critical comments on the limitations and insufficiencies involved, from both the perspective of network pharmacology and current evidence on COVID-19.