Inspirations from natural products based drug research and development for Chinese medicine research —Analysis of natural products recoded in TTD

Natural product is an important source of new drug research and development (R&D).  Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) innovation is the key step for its modernization and internationalization.  However, due to the complexity of TCM, there are many difficulties and confusions in this process.  Target-based drug discovery is the mainstream model and method of R&D. TTD, short for therapeutic target database, is developed by National University of Singapore.  Besides a large amount of information on drug targets, the database also contains considerable information related to natural products.  This paper briefly introduces the TTD, analyzes the natural products derived drugs/compounds recorded in TTD, which we think might provide some inspiration for the innovation of TCM.