Disadvantages of network pharmacology: the selection of disease targets is too subjective. There are often hundreds of disease targets in the articles of network pharmacology research. At this time, if there are fewer ingredients in Chinese medicine, the intersection of drug targets and disease targets will be unbalanced in their overall proportions.
The development background of network pharmacology;
In the mode of drug research and development, we mainly follow the mode of "one drug, one gene and one disease", which is the main reason for the failure of clinical trials of 70% new drugs. In fact, there are many chronic diseases in clinic, such as tumors, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes and so on. All of them are multi-gene and multi-factor diseases, and it is difficult to achieve good therapeutic effect based on a single target.
Take the occurrence of tumor as an example: it takes 10 years to form a cubic centimeter solid tumor, and it goes through six steps: overcoming apoptosis, inhibiting aging (infinite proliferation), secreting self-proliferation signals, being insensitive to growth signals, angiogenesis and invasion, in which a large number of genes and protein participate.