Document Type

Journal Article

Department/Unit

School of Chinese Medicine

Language

English

Abstract

Drug discovery is a risky, costly and time-consuming process depending on multidisciplinary methods to create safe and effective medicines. Although considerable progress has been made by high-throughput screening methods in drug design, the cost of developing contemporary approved drugs did not match that in the past decade. The major reason is the late-stage clinical failures in Phases II and III because of the complicated interactions between drug-specific, human body and environmental aspects affecting the safety and efficacy of a drug. There is a growing hope that systems-level consideration may provide a new perspective to overcome such current difficulties of drug discovery and development. The systems pharmacology method emerged as a holistic approach and has attracted more and more attention recently. The applications of systems pharmacology not only provide the pharmacodynamic evaluation and target identification of drug molecules, but also give a systems-level of understanding the interaction mechanism between drugs and complex disease. Therefore, the present review is an attempt to introduce how holistic systems pharmacology that integrated in silico ADME/T (i.e., absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity), target fishing and network pharmacology facilitates the discovery of small molecular drugs at the system level.

Keywords

drug discovery, systems pharmacology, ADME/T, network pharmacology

Publication Date

2-2016

Source Publication Title

International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Volume

17

Issue

2

Start Page

246

Publisher

MDPI

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).

DOI

10.3390/ijms17020246

Link to Publisher's Edition

http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijms17020246

ISSN (print)

16616596

ISSN (electronic)

14220067

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