title: Systems approaches and polypharmacology for drug discovery from herbal medicines: an example using licorice.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Licorice, one of the oldest and most popular herbal medicines in the world, has been widely used in traditional Chinese medicine as a cough reliever, anti-inflammatory, anti-anabrosis, immunomodulatory, anti-platelet, antiviral (hepatitis) and detoxifying agent. Licorice was used as an example to show drug discovery from herbal drugs using systems approaches and polypharmacology.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  Herbal medicines are becoming more mainstream in clinical practice and show value in treating and preventing diseases. However, due to its extreme complexity both in chemical components and mechanisms of action, deep understanding of botanical drugs is still difficult. Thus, a comprehensive systems approach which could identify active ingredients and their targets in the crude drugs and more importantly, understand the biological basis for the pharmacological properties of herbal medicines is necessary.
  
  
  METHODS
  In this study, a novel systems pharmacology model that integrates oral bioavailability screening, drug-likeness evaluation, blood-brain barrier permeation, target identification and network analysis has been established to investigate the herbal medicines.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The comprehensive systems approach effectively identified 73 bioactive components from licorice and 91 potential targets for this medicinal herb. These 91 targets are closely associated with a series of diseases of respiratory system, cardiovascular system, and gastrointestinal system, etc. These targets are further mapped to drug-target and drug-target-disease networks to elucidate the mechanism of this herbal medicine.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This work provides a novel in silico strategy for investigation of the botanical drugs containing a huge number of components, which has been demonstrated by the well-studied licorice case. This attempt should be helpful for understanding definite mechanisms of action for herbal medicines and discovery of new drugs from plants.
authors: Bioinformatics Center, College of Life Sciences, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi 712100, China.
authors: Hui
authors: H
authors: Liu
authors: Jinan
authors: J
authors: Wang
authors: Wei
authors: W
authors: Zhou
authors: Yonghua
authors: Y
authors: Wang
authors: Ling
authors: L
authors: Yang
mesh_terms: D001682:Biological Availability; D055808:Drug Discovery / Q000379:methods*; D004365:Drugs, Chinese Herbal / Q000302:isolation & purification / Q000493:pharmacokinetics / Q000494:pharmacology; D020834:Ethnopharmacology / Q000379:methods*; D006035:Glycyrrhiza / Q000737:chemistry*; D008516:Medicine, Chinese Traditional; D008954:Models, Biological; D008958:Models, Molecular; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D012984:Software; D013597:Systems Analysis
chemical_list: D004365:Drugs, Chinese Herbal