SymMap: an integrative database of traditional Chinese medicine enhanced by symptom mapping

By Yang Wu, Feilong Zhang, Kuo Yang, Shuangsang Fang, Dechao Bu, Hui Li, Liang Sun, Hai Hu, Kuo Gao, Wei Wang and 3 more. Nucleic Acids Res., 2018

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Recently, the pharmaceutical industry has heavily emphasized phenotypic drug discovery (PDD), which relies primarily on knowledge about phenotype changes associated with diseases. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) provides a massive amount of information on natural products and the clinical symptoms they are used to treat, which are the observable disease phenotypes that are crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment. Curating knowledge of TCM symptoms and their relationships to herbs and diseases will provide both candidate leads and screening directions for evidence-based PDD programs. Therefore, we present SymMap, an integrative database of traditional Chinese medicine enhanced by symptom mapping. We manually curated 1717 TCM symptoms and related them to 499 herbs and 961 symptoms used in modern medicine based on a committee of 17 leading experts practicing TCM. Next, we collected 5235 diseases associated with these symptoms, 19 595 herbal constituents (ingredients) and 4302 target genes, and built a large heterogeneous network containing all of these components. Thus, SymMap integrates TCM with modern medicine in common aspects at both the phenotypic and molecular levels. Furthermore, we inferred all pairwise relationships among SymMap components using statistical tests to give pharmaceutical scientists the ability to rank and filter promising results to guide drug discovery. The SymMap database can be accessed at http://www.symmap.org/ and https://www.bioinfo.org/symmap.

Subfields: Molecular Biology, Pharmacology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e3c3ca8f93407046392f7a76a6ef8da367a6ac2c

How researchers see this paper

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In Molecular Biology

1. Zi‐Yi Wang
2. Jiahui Zheng
3. Xin Wang
4. Shao Li
5. Xiaoxi Zeng

In Pharmacology

1. Zi‐Yi Wang
2. Jiahui Zheng
3. Xin Wang
4. Shao Li

Citations in the corpus

• TCM network pharmacology: A new trend towards combining computational, experimental and clinical approaches. (2021, background): “ETCM [50] provides information on TCM herbs, formulae, and their chemical components, and predicts targets of the compounds according to their chemical fingerprint similarity with known drugs.”
• Network pharmacology: towards the artificial intelligence-based precision traditional Chinese medicine (2023, background): “…and phenotypic characteristics, so there are also relationships between syndromes/phenotypes and the efficacy of herbs/formulas, such as the relationships between syndromes and herbs/formulas mined from databases such as SymMap [34] or based on the principle of co-occurrence in literature [35].”
• HERB: a high-throughput experiment- and reference-guided database of traditional Chinese medicine (2020, methodology): “Prior to HERB-REF, databases like SymMap (21), HIT (15), TCMSP (23) and TCMID (22) have also curated ingredient-target relationships.”