Toward Mechanism-based Therapies and Network Pharmacology

The pharmaceutical industry is currently being critically challenged. Concurrently with an ongoing crisis in drug discovery, available pharmacological treatments are also highly ineffective. The issue stems from our limited understanding of diseases and pharmacology's one‐disease, one‐target, one‐drug dogma that hinders technological innovation and progress. Instead, the molecular mechanisms underlying complex diseases are not single targets but disease networks involving multiple affected components. This new approach has given rise to systems and network medicine, along with their therapeutic counterpart, network pharmacology. These disciplines offer a new promising approach to diseases and their treatments by comprehensively targeting these complex molecular networks, overcoming current pharmaceutical development and treatment limitations.