TCMSP: a database of systems pharmacology for drug discovery from herbal medicines

TCMSP, the traditional Chinese medicine systems pharmacology database and analysis platform, was built on the framework of systems pharmacology to accelerate drug discovery from herbal medicines and to promote integration of modern and traditional medicine. It consists of all 499 Chinese herbs registered in the Chinese pharmacopoeia, with 29,384 ingredients, 3,311 targets, and 837 associated diseases, and it provides twelve important ADME-related properties such as human oral bioavailability, half-life, drug-likeness, Caco-2 permeability, blood-brain barrier penetration, and Lipinski's rule of five for drug screening and evaluation.

For each active compound TCMSP supplies drug targets and diseases, automatically establishing compound-target and target-disease networks that let users view and analyze drug action mechanisms. Its particular strengths are the large number of herbal entries and the ability to construct these networks, which help reveal the mechanisms of action of Chinese herbs, uncover the nature of TCM theory, and support development of new herb-oriented drugs; the resource is freely available.