ABSTRACT
TCM treatment typically comprises complicated prescriptions of a combination of several components with certain relative proportions among the components. The component that forms major proportion of the TCM may not be the most active component, while the component that forms the least proportion of the TCM may be the most active component. The relative component-to-component or component-byfood interactions are usually unknown, which may have an impact on the evaluation of clinical efficacy and safety of the TCM. In addition, the use of CDP is to determine what causes the imbalance among these organs. The dose and treatment duration are flexible to achieve the balance point. This concept leads to the so-called personalized medicine, which minimizes the intrasubject variability. On the other hand, most WMs contain a single active ingredient. After drug discovery, an appropriate formulation (or dosage form) is necessarily developed so that the drug can be delivered to the action site in an efficient way. At the same time, an assay is necessarily developed to quantify the potency of the drug product. The drug product is then tested on animals for determining the toxicity and on humans (healthy volunteers) for observing the pharmacological activities.
