靶向肠道微生态:中药药效机理研究的新机遇与挑战

Targeting microbiome: new opportunities and challenges in the study of pharmacodynamic mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine

肠道微生态紊乱与众多疾病的发生发展密切相关,靶向肠道微生态的调节已成为疾病防治的重要策略。同时,肠道微生态很可能也是理解中医学理论现代科学内涵的重要途径。传统中药大多以口服为主,药物与肠道微生物的相互作用往往是其发挥药效的关键。中药可以通过促进有益菌增殖或抑制病原菌,增加短链脂肪酸等代谢产物生成的方式,恢复疾病条件下的肠道微生态平衡,发挥对疾病的治疗作用。另一方面,肠道菌的代谢转化是影响中药药效和毒性产生的重要途径。针对中药及其复方、人体及肠道微生态三者间的关系,提出三种模式假说,即菌群响应模式、菌群依赖模式和菌群代谢模式,并探讨了当前肠道微生态研究所面临的机遇与挑战。

The gut dysbiosis is closely associated with the development and progression of many diseases.Therefore,targeting gut microbiome has become an important strategy for disease prevention and treatment.Meanwhile,gut microbiome is probably an important way to understand the modern scientific connotation of traditional Chinese medicine.TCM formulae are usually taken orally,in which the chemical components within in TCM formulae will inevitably interact with gut microbiome producing functional metabolites or being metabolized by gut microbiota,which is often the key to their efficacy.Traditional Chinese medicine can restore the gut microbiome under the diseased condition and play a role in the treatment by promoting the proliferation of beneficial bacteria or inhibiting pathogenic bacteria,and increasing the production of metabolites such as SCFA;Besides,the metabolic transformation of gut microbiota can affect the efficacy of TCM and result in toxicity.Therefore,in this paper,we proposed the"Three Models"hypothesis for understanding the interaction among TCM formulae,gut microbiome and host,i.e.,the responsive model of microbiome,the microbiomedependent model and the microbiome metabolism model,and also discussed the opportunity and challenge of current research on gut microbiome.