Chinese herb recipe is widely applied and plays a key role in traditional Chinese medicine. However, it involves complicated aspects, and the mechanism researches of Chinese herb recipe had few breakthroughs. The author discussed the questions in the scopes as follows: drug mechanism and chemical components, old typical and current experimental recipes, drug action and its pathological mechanisms. The author believed that the recipe with solid clinical effect should be investigated combining the single herb with its chemical components, and combining the pharmacological mechanism of the recipe with the pathological mechanism of the diseases. More attention should be paid to effect of the research on the improvement of the traditional Chinese medical theory, and efforts should be made to investigate the recipe mechanism relating to molecular signal transduction and the key chemical components.

Key words: Chinese herbs, pharmacology, chemistry, pathology, signal transduction