SymMap

SymMap integrates traditional Chinese medicine herbs, symptoms, diseases, ingredients, and target genes to map clinical phenotypes to molecular targets for applications such as phenotypic drug discovery.

Key Features:

• Extensive Database Content: Contains 499 herbs, 19,595 constituent ingredients, 1,717 TCM symptoms mapped to 961 corresponding modern symptom terms, 5,235 diseases, and 4,302 target genes.
• Symptom Mapping: Maps TCM symptoms to modern medical symptom terms with curation by a committee of 17 TCM experts.
• Disease and Target Associations: Records symptom–disease relationships and ingredient–target interactions linking herbs and ingredients to diseases and 4,302 genes.
• Heterogeneous Network Construction: Integrates herbs, ingredients, symptoms, diseases, and target genes into a large heterogeneous network for joint phenotypic and molecular analysis.
• Inference of Relationships: Applies statistical tests to infer pairwise relationships among components for ranking and filtering candidate leads.

Scientific Applications:

• Phenotypic Drug Discovery: Links phenotype changes and mapped symptoms to herbal ingredients and molecular targets to support phenotypic screening and lead identification.
• Therapeutic Hypothesis Generation: Enables exploration of relationships among herbs, ingredients, target genes, symptoms, and diseases to generate candidate therapeutic leads and mechanistic hypotheses.

Methodology:

Curated mappings of TCM symptoms to modern symptom terms by 17 experts; compilation of herb–ingredient, ingredient–target, and symptom–disease relationships; integration of all components into a heterogeneous network; application of statistical tests to infer pairwise relationships.