NP-TCMtarget: a network pharmacology platform for exploring mechanisms of action of Traditional Chinese medicine

TL;DR

NP-TCMtarget is a novel computational platform integrating chemical and biological data to systematically identify and analyze the targets and mechanisms of Traditional Chinese Medicine, aiding in understanding its molecular basis.

Contribution

The paper introduces NP-TCMtarget, a new integrated model combining chemical and biological profiles for systematic TCM target discovery and mechanism elucidation.

Findings

Successfully identified TCM effect and binding targets

Revealed action pathways of herbal components

Demonstrated application on XiaoKeAn formula

Abstract

The biological targets of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) are the core effectors mediating the interaction between TCM and the human body. Identification of TCM targets is essential to elucidate the chemical basis and mechanisms of TCM for treating diseases. Given the chemical complexity of TCM, both in silico high-throughput drug-target interaction predicting models and biological profile-based methods have been commonly applied for identifying TCM targets based on the structural information of TCM chemical components and biological information, respectively. However, the existing methods lack the integration of TCM chemical and biological information, resulting in difficulty in the systematic discovery of TCM action pathways. To solve this problem, we propose a novel target identification model NP-TCMtarget to explore the TCM target path by combining the overall chemical and biological profiles. First, NP-TCMtarget infers TCM effect targets by calculating associations between drug/disease inducible gene expression profiles and specific gene signatures for 8,233 targets. Then, NP-TCMtarget utilizes a constructed binary classification model to predict binding targets of herbal ingredients. Finally, we can distinguish TCM direct and indirect targets by comparing the effect targets and binding targets to establish the action pathways of herbal components-direct targets-indirect targets by mapping TCM targets in the biological molecular network. We apply NP-TCMtarget to the formula XiaoKeAn to demonstrate the power of revealing the action pathways of herbal formula. We expect that this novel model could provide a systematic framework for exploring the molecular mechanisms of TCM at the target level. NP-TCMtarget is available at http://www.bcxnfz.top/NP-TCMtarget.