Abstract:

Lifestyle disorders like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers are difficult to manage using one drug-one target approach and so require a multi-targeted approach. Any drug-whether chemical, botanical or biological-will have inherent limitations if it is focused only on a single target when dealing with polygenic syndromes. A new branch known as network pharmacology which integrates systems biology and computational biology has emerged to study drug interactions with multiple targets. Several traditional multi-botanical formulations are widely used globally; however, their rationale and scientific evidence for pharmacodynamic actions remain insufficient. A systematic study of network ethnopharmacology- network pharmacology of medicinal botanicals- is considered as promising approach to understand the scientific basis of intelligent formulations which would facilitate transition from single target based drug discovery to multi-target based rational formulation discovery.