Network pharmacology-based strategy for screening active compounds and significant pathways of huachansu capsule on cancerous pain.

Abstract

e24054 Background: Cancerous pain (CP) is a troublesome symptom which can not be adequately controlled. It is reported by several clinical studies that Huachansu can help to relieve CP. However, its mechanism is unclear. In this study, we try to use network pharmacology to explore the underlying mechanism of Huachansu capsule (a capsule form of Huachansu) in the treatment of CP. Methods: Firstly, we collected Huachansu capsule’s active compounds from the literature. And then DrugBank and SwissTargetPrediction were used to obtain the drug targets. Genecards, OMIM, Drugbank, CTD, TTD and DisGeNET were used to gather CP-related genes. Cytoscape 3.7.2 was applied to construct the PPI network. The candidate genes were screened according to betweenness centrality (BC), closeness centrality (CC), degree centrality (DC) and local average connectivity (LAC). A PPI enrichment analysis was performed by MCODE. GO and KEGG analysis were carried out by Metascape. Results: In this study, we collected 11 active compounds and 235 CP-related targets of Huachansu capsule. Go analysis showed that the main related-biological functions included immune response, cytokine-mediated signaling, hypoxia. The main related-KEGG pathways included MAPK, AMPK, mTOR, erbB, Chemokine, TNF, HIF-1, toll-like receptor, PI3K-Akt, cAMP and NF-Kappa B signaling pathway. Conclusions: This study provides a systematic view of the polypharmacological characteristics of Huachansu capsule for pain treatment. Nevertheless, it still need to be verified by in vitro or in vivo studies.