Development Of A Chinese Medicine-drug Interaction Database “probot”

• By: ZUO, Zhong (School of Pharmacy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR China)
• Co-author(s): Prof Zhong Zuo (School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, SHATIN, Hong Kong SAR China)
  Dr. Yufeng Zhang (School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, SHATIN, Hong Kong SAR China)
  Ms. Min Xiao (School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, SHATIN, Hong Kong SAR China)
  Mr. Ka Lok Chan (School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, SHATIN, Hong Kong SAR China)
  Ms. Yijing Yang (School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, SHATIN, Hong Kong SAR China)
  Dr. Ben Ip (School of Pharmacy, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, SHATIN, Hong Kong SAR China)
  Prof. Irwin King (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong , SHATIN, Hong Kong SAR China)
  Dr. Ching Tung Au (Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR China)
  Mr. Xiang Yu He (Healthy Power Limited, Hong Kong SAR China)
  
• Abstract:

  [Background]:
  Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is widely accepted for the treatment and prevention of various diseases in China and other Asian regions. In 2009, a survey in Hong Kong found that 57.1% of cancer patients used TCM as supportive treatment (Lam YC, 2009). However, the curative effect of the combination of TCM and Western drugs in the surveyed patients (61.7%) was not better than that of patients who used western drugs alone (72%). A Chinese medicine-drug interaction (CMDI) database is highly needed to guide the combined use of TCM and western drugs for clinical practitioners.
  
  [Purpose]:
  To develop an on-line database to provide updated interaction information between TCM and western drugs for clinical practitioners.
  
  [Method]:
  Published abstracts in PubMed, Wanfang and CNKI about TCM and western drugs are periodically retrieved by our developed web scrapping system (DP2) and stored in our developed Reference Management and Annotation System (RMAS). Then, a series of artificial intelligence (AI) models were developed and applied to the crawled abstracts to (i) screen the CMDI relevancy of an abstract for further processing; (ii) extract the entities of TCM, western drugs, species and pharmacokinetics parameters; and (iii) summarize the conclusion of CMDI between TCM and western drugs. The information extracted by AI were then reviewed and approved by experienced researchers before they could be uploaded and searchable on the final platform named “PROBOT” (http://www.probot.hk).
  
  [Results]:
  As of February 2023, a total of 4964 CMDI-related references were identified from 1.4 million references in RMAS, from which 6292 interaction pairs were extracted. The numbers of TCM herbs and western drugs included in our developed database were 193 and 726, respectively. The database could be used after authorization and could be retrieved through both Chinese and English keywords and further filtered by study types and sources of data. Since the platform was launched, the number of queries has exceeded 12,000 and the registered users reached 283.
  
  [Conclusion]:
  With the aid of AI, an on-line CMDI database was developed for clinical practitioners’ efficient search of CMDI information. As all the information were evidenced by their original source, the CMDI database would become a valuable reference to check the potential safety when combined use of TCM and western drugs occur.
  
  [References]:
  Lam YC, Cheng CW, Peng H, Law CK, Huang X, Bian Z. (2009). Cancer patients' attitudes towards Chinese medicine: a Hong Kong survey. Chin Med. 4:25. https://doi.org/10.1186/1749-8546-4-25