@pipeworx/symmap

SymMap v2 (symmap.org, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine) — the Traditional Chinese Medicine association graph: 698 herbs, ~26k ingredients, ~21k protein targets, TCM symptoms, TCM syndromes, modern medical symptoms and ~14k diseases, connected by curated and predicted associations. Every relationship payload carries an explicit evidence_tier (traditional_use | human_clinical | laboratory | computational_prediction) and an evidence_basis sentence, because SymMap records associations, not efficacy — nothing in it is clinical proof that a herb treats anything.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1866+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• symmap_search(query, entity) — resolve a name (Chinese, pinyin, Latin, English, gene symbol, disease name) to SymMap ids across any of the seven entity classes.
• symmap_herb(herb) — full bilingual herb record: TCM properties, meridians, drug class, used part, all name forms.
• symmap_herb_ingredients(herb) — molecules identified in a herb, with PubChem CID, CAS and oral-bioavailability score.
• symmap_herb_symptoms(herb) — the herb's traditional indications: TCM symptoms (SMTS) and TCM syndromes (SMSY), kept separate from the modern vocabulary.
• symmap_symptom_herbs(symptom, system) — herbs for a symptom; system:"tcm" is a direct lookup, system:"modern" goes through SymMap's curated modern→TCM symptom crosswalk with both hops explicit.
• symmap_ingredient(ingredient) — an ingredient's protein targets (PubMed-cited edges are tier laboratory, uncited ones computational_prediction) and the herbs it occurs in.
• symmap_target_diseases(target) — diseases associated with a gene; OMIM/Orphanet-backed edges are tier human_clinical, the rest computational_prediction.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• http://www.symmap.org/related_components/ — form-POST JSON: association edges for one entity (rrid, table_name, filter).
• http://www.symmap.org/search/ — form-POST JSON: entity search by name (table_name, key).
• src/herbs.ts — the herb entity table, generated by scripts/bake-herbs.py from the SMHB file on SymMap's download page, so herb lookup never depends on the upstream server.

Things the next person would rediscover the hard way:

• The site is plain HTTP only — https://www.symmap.org does not answer.
• The downloadable "key files" are NOT relation edges. They are long-format (id, Field_name, Field_context) dumps of the same entity tables. The actual graph edges are only served by /related_components/.
• Some join directions 502 by design of their backend: herb→Gene, herb→Disease, herb→MM_symptom and MM_symptom→Herb all return 502 every time, while herb→Mol, herb→TCM_symptom, herb→Syndrome, Mol→Gene, Mol→Herb, TCM_symptom↔MM_symptom, TCM_symptom→Herb, Syndrome→Herb, Gene→Disease and Disease→Gene answer reliably. The tools compose only the reliable directions; a herb's targets are reached herb→ingredients→targets, one hop at a time.
• rrid accepts both SMHB1 and SMHB00001 forms.
• In v2.0, SMTS is TCM symptoms, SMSY is TCM syndromes (new in v2), SMMS is modern-medicine symptoms. The v1 downloads reuse SMTS differently; don't mix versions.
• Ingredient→target literature evidence arrives as an HTML snippet with the same sentence twice (short + long variants) plus a Fold button; the pack extracts the long variant and the PMIDs.

Licence / attribution

SymMap is a free-to-access academic database; its site states the download files are free to download and carries no further reuse terms. Cite the paper when publishing results: Wu et al., SymMap: an integrative database of traditional Chinese medicine enhanced by symptom mapping, Nucleic Acids Research 2019, doi:10.1093

... View full README on GitHub