Abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of irreversible blindness globally. Qidengmingmu Capsule (QC) is a Chinese patent medicine used to treat DR, but the molecular mechanism of the treatment remains unknown. In this study, we identified and validated potential molecular mechanisms involved in the treatment of DR with QC via network pharmacology and molecular docking methods. The results of Ingredient-DR Target Network showed that 134 common targets and 20 active ingredients of QC were involved. According to the results of enrichment analysis, 2307 biological processes and 40 pathways were related to the treatment effects. Most of these processes and pathways were important for cell survival and were associated with many key factors in DR, such as vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGFA), hypoxia-inducible factor-1A (HIF-1Α), and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα). Based on the results of the PPI network and KEGG enrichment analyses, we selected AKT1, HIF-1α, VEGFA, TNFα and their corresponding active ingredients for molecular docking. According to the molecular docking results, several key targets of DR (including AKT1, HIF-1α, VEGFA, and TNFα) can form stable bonds with the corresponding active ingredients of QC. In conclusion, through network pharmacology methods, we found that potential biological mechanisms involved in the alleviation of DR by QC are related to multiple biological processes and signaling pathways. The molecular docking results also provide us with sound directions for further experiments.
Highlights
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of irreversible blindness globally
We obtained 28 ingredients and 193 Qidengmingmu Capsule (QC)-related targets that satisfied the criteria of an Oral bioavailability (OB) ≥ 30% and a DL ≥ 0.18 by searching the keywords “Erigeron Breviscapus”, “Astragalus membranaceus” and “Radix Puerariae” in the TCMSP database
The results suggested that QC-DR common targets are concentrated mainly in vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGFA) signaling, HIF-1 signaling, PI3K-Akt signaling, NF-κB signaling and apoptosis-related signaling pathways, which heavily participate in the etiology of DR
Summary
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of irreversible blindness globally. Qidengmingmu Capsule (QC) is a Chinese patent medicine used to treat DR, but the molecular mechanism of the treatment remains unknown. According to the results of enrichment analysis, 2307 biological processes and 40 pathways were related to the treatment effects Most of these processes and pathways were important for cell survival and were associated with many key factors in DR, such as vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGFA), hypoxia-inducible factor-1A (HIF-1Α), and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα). Based on the interactions between active herbal ingredients and potential targets of disease, network pharmacological methods can identify the potential mechanisms and key targets from network topological analysis. These methods can be used to identify synergistic effects of herbal ingredients, to understand combinatorial rules of TCM formulae, and to help clinical practitioners design herbal formulae r ationally[9]. To explore and validate the potential mechanism of QC in the treatment of DR, we performed this study based on the methods mentioned above
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