As an alternative to modern western medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is receiving increasingly attention worldwide. Great efforts have been paid to TCM’s modernization, which tries to bridge the gap between TCM and modern western medicine. As TCM and modern western medicine share a common aspect at molecular level that the compound(s) perturb human’s dysfunction network and restore human normal physiological condition, the relationship between compounds (in herb, refer to ingredients) and their targets (proteins) should be the key factor to connect TCM and modern medicine. Accordingly, we construct this Traditional Chinese Medicine Integrated Database (TCMID, http://www.megabionet.org/tcmid/), which records TCM-related information collected from different resources and through text-mining method. To enlarge the scope of the TCMID, the data have been linked to common drug and disease databases, including Drugbank, OMIM and PubChem. Currently, our TCMID contains ∼47 000 prescriptions, 8159 herbs, 25 210 compounds, 6828 drugs, 3791 diseases and 17 521 related targets, which is the largest data set for related field. Our web-based software displays a network for integrative relationships between herbs and their treated diseases, the active ingredients and their targets, which will facilitate the study of combination therapy and understanding of the underlying mechanisms for TCM at molecular level.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.