A network-based analysis of the types of coronary artery disease from traditional Chinese medicine perspective: Potential for therapeutics and drug discovery

Ethnopharmacological relevance: Coronary heart disease (CAD) is one of the most dangerous threats to human health due to its high incidence and high mortality. CAD has several major types, such as blood stasis and qi deficiency according to the syndromes of diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which are treated with different herbs or compound prescriptions. However, up to now a deep analysis of the relationship between CAD and its types both at molecular or systems levels is still unavailable, which greatly limits the combination of TCMs with Western drugs to form an integrative/alternative medicine for treatment of the complex disease. Materials and methods: In this review, we attempt to decipher the underlying mechanisms of major types of CAD by connecting the drugs, targets and diseases to obtain the compound-target-disease associations for reconstructing the biologically-meaningful networks based on systems pharmacology method. Results: The results indicate that the herbs for eliminating blood stasis have pharmacological activity of dilating blood vessel, improving the microcirculation, reducing blood viscosity and regulating blood lipid, while qi-enhancing herbs have the potential for enhancing energy metabolism and anti-inflammation. Conclusions: A systematic exploration of types of CAD may bring out the best between research on drug molecules and TCM phenotypic information, so as to accelerate development of network-based drug discovery as well as to facilitate the therapy of this disease. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.