代谢组学——中药现代化的顺风车

目前,现代科技已广泛运用于中药材资源开发、中药炮制、中药制备工艺以及剂型等方面,并取得了令人瞩目的成就。然而,在发展过程中也存在诸多瓶颈问题,比如:如何探究中药的药效基础,如何构建中药疗效的评价方法,如何在中药栽培过程中控制其有效成分等棘手问题。中药药效的特点是多组分、多途径、多靶点发挥整体调节作用,因此中药药效的评价强调人或者实验动物对药物干预体系的整体作用。而代谢组学是寻找代谢产物的终端性信息、阐明药物相互作用过程中的靶点或受体,观察药物引起的内源性代谢物以及药物分子本身的动态变化。利用现代的系统生物学理论和技术,为中药的现代化发展提供契机与挑战,因此运用代谢组学技术具有重要的意义。

Metabolomics-A Free Ride on Modernization of Traditional Chinese Medicine

At present,modern technology has been widely used in the development of Chinese herbal medicine resources,Chinese medicine processing,Chinese medicine preparation process and dosage forms,and achieved remarkable achievements.However,there are many bottlenecks in the development process,such as how to explore the basis of the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine,how to construct the evaluation method of traditional Chinese medicine efficacy,how to control its effective ingredients in the traditional Chinese medicine cultivation process and other difficult problems.The efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine is characterized by an overall regulatory function with multi-component,multi-channel and multi-target,so the evaluation of efficacy of TCM emphasizes the overall effect on patients or experimental animals of drug intervention system.Metabolomics is going for finding the terminal information of metabolites,clarifying the targets or receptors in the process of drug interactions,observing the endogenous metabolites caused by drugs,and the dynamic changes in the drug molecules themselves.It utilizes modem systems biology theories and techniques to provide opportunities and challenges for the modernization of Chinese medicine,so the use of metabolomics techniques is of great importance,although there are still problem such as extracting available data from non-linear metabolomics data,but with the above problems gradually resolved,metabolomics will be more powerful to promote the development of Chinese medicine industry,which is called the free ride on modernization of traditional Chinese medicine.