Network Pharmacology for Traditional Chinese Medicine Research: Methodologies and Applications

The inception of network pharmacology comes from the advance in “multi-target, multi-drug” paradigm and opens up a new field for pharmaceutical science. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is well-known for its use of medicinal herb combinations to treat the functional disorders induced by diseases through a holistic view, which naturally followed the principal of network pharmacology. In this review, the methodologies of network pharmacology in TCM studies were summarized. Specifically, the methodologies for network construction and network analysis were discussed in detail by following several TCM study cases. The perspectives for TCM network pharmacology were also provided.