Modular pharmacology: deciphering the interacting structural organization of the targeted networks

Abstract

Because multiple drugs act within the context of the regulatory networks in which drug targets and disease gene products function, module-designed studies are becoming increasingly important for revealing the relationships between drug actions and disease outcomes in network pharmacology. In this review we discuss how network-based analyses of modules' structures and new modules have contributed to the genesis of modular structure and how these studies have improved the global understanding of the interacting structural organization at a genomic level, so as to suggest a new paradigm for medical research and drug discovery. We develop a framework of Modular Pharmacology (MP) that deciphers a given-ordered modular design of diseases and optimizes modules in a pharmacological network to reverse the complex diseases.