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Review
. 2022 May 4;15(5):572.
doi: 10.3390/ph15050572.

Network Pharmacology Approach for Medicinal Plants: Review and Assessment

Fatima Noor  1 , Muhammad Tahir Ul Qamar  1 , Usman Ali Ashfaq  1 , Aqel Albutti  2 , Ameen S S Alwashmi  3 , Mohammad Abdullah Aljasir  3
Affiliations
Review

Network Pharmacology Approach for Medicinal Plants: Review and Assessment

Fatima Noor et al. Pharmaceuticals (Basel). .

Abstract

Natural products have played a critical role in medicine due to their ability to bind and modulate cellular targets involved in disease. Medicinal plants hold a variety of bioactive scaffolds for the treatment of multiple disorders. The less adverse effects, affordability, and easy accessibility highlight their potential in traditional remedies. Identifying pharmacological targets from active ingredients of medicinal plants has become a hot topic for biomedical research to generate innovative therapies. By developing an unprecedented opportunity for the systematic investigation of traditional medicines, network pharmacology is evolving as a systematic paradigm and becoming a frontier research field of drug discovery and development. The advancement of network pharmacology has opened up new avenues for understanding the complex bioactive components found in various medicinal plants. This study is attributed to a comprehensive summary of network pharmacology based on current research, highlighting various active ingredients, related techniques/tools/databases, and drug discovery and development applications. Moreover, this study would serve as a protocol for discovering novel compounds to explore the full range of biological potential of traditionally used plants. We have attempted to cover this vast topic in the review form. We hope it will serve as a significant pioneer for researchers working with medicinal plants by employing network pharmacology approaches.

Keywords: active ingredients; drug discovery; medicinal plants; network pharmacology; system biology.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Timeline diagram representing the origin of network pharmacology.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Graphical synopsis of network pharmacology research for the discovery of herbal medicines-derived targets, effect prediction, mechanism clarification, and new drug assistant discovery using network pharmacology approach. It analyzes the information from public data, high-throughput experimental data, and herbal medicinal data and constructs network using technologies of network expansion, optimization, comparison, knockout, and addition. Finally, it carries out computational and experimental verifications.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Three main application of network pharmacology in health biology for exploring the basic pharmacological effects of drugs on diseases and their mechanisms.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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