ccTCM: a quantitative component and compound platform for promoting the research of traditional Chinese medicine

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) databases play a vital role in bridging the gap between TCM and modern medicine, as well as in promoting the popularity of TCM. Elucidating the bioactive ingredients of Chinese medicinal materials is key to TCM modernization and new drug discovery. However, one drawback of current TCM databases is the lack of quantitative data on the constituents of Chinese medicinal materials. Herein, we present ccTCM, a web-based platform designed to provide a component and compound-content-based resource on TCM and analysis services for medical experts. In terms of design features, ccTCM combines resource distribution, similarity analysis, and molecular-mechanism analysis to accelerate the discovery of bioactive ingredients in TCM. ccTCM contains 273 Chinese medicinal materials commonly used in clinical settings, covering 29 functional classifications. By searching and comparing, we finally adopted 2043 studies, from which we collected the compounds contained in each TCM with content greater than 0.001%, and a total of 1 449 were extracted. Subsequently, we collected 40767 compound-target pairs by integrating multiple databases. Taken together, ccTCM is a versatile platform for that can be used by TCM scientists to perform scientific and clinical TCM studies based on quantified ingredients of Chinese medicinal materials. ccTCM is freely accessible at http://www.cctcm.org.cn.