Exploring the Mechanism of Comfrey in Lung Cancer Based on Network Pharmacology and Molecular Docking

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Network pharmacology was used to investigate the active ingredients and mechanism of action of the Chinese medicine comfrey in lung cancer. Comfrey constituents and their targets were collected by searching the TCMSP and PubChem databases. The Gene Cards database was searched to extract target information for lung cancer. Based on the STRING database, Cytoscape 3.9.1 software was used to construct the PPI network of common targets of comfrey in lung cancer. We searched for common targets and performed GO and KEGG pathway enrichment analyses to build a 'network diagram' of TCM active ingredient-disease targets. The results of the pharmacological network analysis showed that after the screening, 12 compounds and 904 drug targets were obtained, and 147 drug-disease common targets were obtained, with AKT1, EGFR, TNF, and CASP3 as the core targets. After enrichment analysis of the above key targets, it was found that cancer pathways, prostate cancer, PI3K-Akt signaling pathway, endocrine resistance, and cancer proteoglycans were involved in the treatment of comfrey. The molecular docking results also showed that the comfrey compounds had good binding activities with the key targets, proving the accuracy of the network pharmacological prediction results. The results of this experiment provisionally verified the basic pharmacological effects of comfrey and its mechanism of action against lung cancer and provided directions for further research.