Symmap MCP server

@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 evidencetier (traditionaluse | humanclinical | laboratory | computationalprediction) 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 1576+ live data sources.

Tools

English, gene symbol, disease name) to SymMap ids across any of the seven entity classes.

• symmap_search(query, entity) — resolve a name (Chinese, pinyin, Latin,

drug class, used part, all name forms.

• symmap_herb(herb) — full bilingual herb record: TCM properties, meridians,

PubChem CID, CAS and oral-bioavailability score.

• symmapherbingredients(herb) — molecules identified in a herb, with

symptoms (SMTS) and TCM syndromes (SMSY), kept separate from the modern vocabulary.

• symmapherbsymptoms(herb) — the herb's traditional indications: TCM

is a direct lookup, system:"modern" goes through SymMap's curated modern→TCM symptom crosswalk with both hops explicit.

• symmapsymptomherbs(symptom, system) — herbs for a symptom; system:"tcm"

(PubMed-cited edges are tier laboratory, uncited ones computational_prediction) and the herbs it occurs in.

• symmap_ingredient(ingredient) — an ingredient's protein targets

OMIM/Orphanet-backed edges are tier humanclinical, the rest computationalprediction.

• symmaptargetdiseases(target) — diseases associated with a gene;

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

edges for one entity (rrid, table_name, filter).

• — form-POST JSON: association

(table_name, key).

• — form-POST JSON: entity search by name

from the SMHB file on SymMap's download page, so herb lookup never depends on the upstream server.

• src/herbs.ts — the herb entity table, generated by scripts/bake-herbs.py

Things the next person would rediscover the hard way:

(id, Fieldname, Fieldcontext) dumps of the same entity tables. The actual graph edges are only served by /related_components/.

• 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

herb→Disease, herb→MMsymptom and MMsymptom→Herb all return 502 every time, while herb→Mol, herb→TCMsymptom, herb→Syndrome, Mol→Gene, Mol→Herb, TCMsymptom↔MMsymptom, TCMsymptom→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.

• Some join directions 502 by design of their backend: herb→Gene,

SMMS is modern-medicine symptoms. The v1 downloads reuse SMTS differently; don't mix versions.

• rrid accepts both SMHB1 and SMHB00001 forms.
• In v2.0, SMTS is TCM symptoms, SMSY is TCM syndromes (new in v2),

same sentence twice (short + long variants) plus a Fold button; the pack extracts the long variant and the PMIDs.

• Ingredient→target literature evidence arrives as an HTML snippet with the

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/nar/gky1021.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.