Spectrum-Effect Relationship in Chinese Herbal Medicine: Current Status and Future Perspectives

The quality of Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) directly impacts clinical efficacy and safety. Fingerprint technology is an internationally recognized method for evaluating the quality of CHM. However, the existing quality evaluation models based on fingerprint technology have blocked the ability to assess the internal quality of CHM and cannot comprehensively reflect the correlation between pharmacodynamic information and active constituents. Through mathematical methods, a connection between the "Spectrum" (fingerprint) and the "Effect" (pharmacodynamic data) was established to conduct a spectrum-effect relationship (SER) of CHM to unravel the active component information associated with the pharmacodynamic activity. Consequently, SER can efficiently address the limitations of the segmentation of chemical components and pharmacodynamic effect in CHM and further improve the quality evaluation of CHM. This review focuses on the recent research progress of SER in the field of CHM, including the establishment of fingerprint, the selection of data analysis methods, and their recent applications in the field of CHM. Various advanced fingerprint techniques are introduced, followed by the data analysis methods used in recent years are summarized. Finally, the applications of SER based on different research subjects are described in detail. In addition, the advantages of combining SER with other data are discussed through practical applications, and the research on SER is summarized and prospected. This review proves the validity and development potential of the SER and provides a reference for the development and application of quality evaluation methods for CHM.