Multi-target therapeutics and new drug discovery

Drugs acting on individual molecular targets usually exert unsatisfying therapeutic effects or have severe toxicity when used in diseases of complicated causes such as tumor, diabetes and inflammation.  Multi- target therapeutics which regulates multiple nodes of the disease network simultaneously shows synergistic effect, is unlikely to induce resistance and provides optimal clinical use.  This review summarized the characteristics, classification, development strategies and screening models, current multi-target therapeutic drugs used in clinic and also explored the potential of TCM in multi-target therapeutics.