CONET: a virtual human system-centered platform for drug discovery

摘要

One of the most promising approaches to overcome the current limits of new drug development is to utilize natural products with known empirical efficacy, i.e., reverse pharmacology [1,2]. Natural product-based drugs can be classified into two categories, natural product-derived compounds (NPC) and natural product extracts (NPE). NPC means pure compounds derived from natural products. Aspirin from willow trees and Taxol from pacific yew trees are famous examples of the NPC drugs. On the other hand, NPE means mixture of natural compounds. Pharmaton from Ginseng and Tebonin from Ginko, licensed Boehringer Ingelheim and Schwabe, respectively, are famous examples of the NPE. Recently, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved two NPE drugs, Veregen and Fulyzaq. Currently, it has been known that more than 100 NPE drug candidates are in the FDA clinical trial stages. Though the attentions and interests for NPE drugs are increasing dramatically due to their higher success ratio, shorter time and lower cost of development comparing to the chemical drugs, there are two major intrinsic problems to solve.