INPUT: An intelligent network pharmacology platform unique for traditional Chinese medicine

The application of network pharmacology has greatly promoted the scientific interpretation of disease treatment mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). However, the data required by network pharmacology analysis were scattered in different resources. In the present work, by integrating and reorganizing the data from multiple resources, we developed the intelligent network pharmacology platform unique for traditional Chinese medicine, called INPUT (http://cbcb.cdutcm.edu.cn/INPUT/), for automatically performing network pharmacology analysis. Besides the curated data collected from multiple resources, a series of bioinformatics tools for network pharmacology analysis were also embedded in INPUT, which makes it become the first automatic platform able to explore the disease treatment mechanisms of TCM. With the built-in tools, researchers can also analyze their own in-house data and obtain the results of pivotal ingredients, GO and KEGG pathway, protein-protein interactions, etc. In addition, as a proof-of-principle, INPUT was applied to decipher the antidepressant mechanism of a commonly used prescription. In summary, INPUT is a powerful platform for network pharmacology analysis and will facilitate the researches on drug discovery.