From empiricism to precision: SHINE strategy in anti-fibrotic drug discovery

Fibrosis contributes substantially to global morbidity and mortality, while approved agents such as pirfenidone and nintedanib ( Table 1 ) primarily delay disease progression rather than reverse established scarring ( King et al., 2014 ). This persistent therapeutic gap has renewed interest in alternative sources of anti-fibrotic leads. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formulas represent a vast and clinically validated repository of multi-component therapies, yet conventional reductionist drug discovery paradigms have struggled to fully harness their complexity. In this context, Xin et al. propose the smart herbal-based innovation and translational engine (SHINE), an integrative framework that bridges TCM theory with artificial intelligence (AI), multi-omics technologies, and biosynthetic engineering to accelerate anti-fibrotic drug discovery ( Xin et al., 2025 ). The SHINE framework specifically operationalizes this integration through tissue-directed intelligent screening, physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling, and spatial metabolomics, thereby translating the TCM concept of “meridian tropism” into quantifiable distribution parameters.