title: Potentiating therapeutic effects by enhancing synergism based on active constituents from traditional medicine.
abstract: Shifting current drug discovery tide from 'finding new drugs' to 'screening natural products' may be helpful for overcoming the 'more investment, fewer drugs' challenge. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), relying on natural products, has been playing a very important role in health protection and disease control for thousands of years in Asia, whose therapeutic efficacy is based on the 'synergism', that is, the combinational effects to be greater than that of the individual drug. Based on syndromes and patient characteristics and guided by the theories of TCM, formulae are designed to contain a combination of various kinds of crude drugs that, when combined, generally assume that a synergism of all ingredients will bring about the maximum of therapeutic efficacy. The increasing evidence has shown that multiple active component combinations of TCM could amplify the therapeutic efficacy of each agent, representing a new trend for modern medicine. However, the precise mechanism of synergistic action remains poorly understood. The present review highlights the concept of synergy and gives some examples of synergistic effects of TCM, and provides an overview of the recent and potential developments of advancing drug discovery towards more agile development of targeted combination therapies from TCM.
authors.affiliation: National TCM Key Lab of Serum Pharmacochemistry, Key Lab of Chinmedomics, Key Pharmacometabolomics Platform of Chinese Medicines, Heilongjiang University of Chinese Medicine, Heping Road 24, Harbin, 150040, China.
authors.forename: Aihua
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Xijun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D001688:Biological Products / Q000494:pharmacology; D055808:Drug Discovery; D004357:Drug Synergism; D004359:Drug Therapy, Combination; D004365:Drugs, Chinese Herbal / Q000494:pharmacology; D006801:Humans; D008516:Medicine, Chinese Traditional; D049490:Systems Biology
chemical_list: D001688:Biological Products; D004365:Drugs, Chinese Herbal
keywords: active ingredient; synergism; system biology; traditional medicine