What is it about?
Mining the potential of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in treating modern diseases requires a profound understanding of its action mechanism and a comprehensive knowledge system that seamlessly bridges modern medical insights with traditional theories. However, existing databases for modernizing TCM are plagued by varying degrees of information loss, which impede the multidimensional dissection of pharmacological effects. To address this challenge, we introduce traditional Chinese medicine modernization (TCMM), the currently largest modernized TCM database that integrates pioneering intelligent pipelines. By aligning high-quality TCM and modern medicine data, TCMM boasts the most extensive TCM modernization knowledge, including 20 types of modernized TCM concepts such as prescription, ingredient, target and 46 biological relations among them, totaling 3,447,023 records. We demonstrate the efficacy and reliability of TCMM with two features, prescription generation and knowledge discovery, the outcomes show consistency with biological experimental results. A publicly available web interface is at https://www.tcmm.net.cn/
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Why is it important?
TCM is an empirical science based on thousands of years of clinical experience and remains essential in diagnosing and treating diseases [1] . Recent investigations [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] have demonstrated that TCM and modern medicine have a common theoretical basis at the molecular level. Specifically, compounds can effectively treat diseases by regulating the efficacy of certain targets. However, there is a lack of current knowledge regarding the chemical components and metabolism mechanisms of TCM, which obscures the association between drug components and pharmacological effects, therefore impeding targeted TCM diagnosis and treatment. Therefore, in the modernization process of TCM, it is crucial to develop a comprehensive and highly reliable TCM modernization database, which would facilitate the identification of active ingredients and clarify the action mechanism with biological targets.
Perspectives
In this work, we introduce TCMM, a unified database for TCM modernization that integrates 6 high-quality databases of TCM and modern medicine. According to Table 1 , TCMM is the currently largest non-commercial database for TCM modernization, consisting of 20 typical entities such as prescription, ingredient, target and 46 relations among them, aiming to comprehensively encompass the theoretical foundations of TCM and modern medicine. A web-based interface is provided for users to explore relations among medical knowledge. Based on the constructed database, a prescription generation pipeline with pre-train method is proposed, which can create highly credible prescriptions, thereby revealing the potential of the database. This pipeline is integrated into the website to support user-customized prescription generation. Furthermore, in the absence of direct data, we pioneering use a multi-hop reasoning method to achieve TCM knowledge discovery. This includes 2 challenging tasks, prescription repositioning and symptom-related target prediction. The results highly match experimental conclusions in case studies, effectively supporting TCM modernization.
Zhixiang Ren
Peng Cheng Laboratory
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: TCMM: A unified database for traditional Chinese medicine modernization and therapeutic innovations, Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, December 2024, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2024.04.016.
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