Abstract
Pulmonary fibrosis is a chronic, progressive and irreversible heterogeneous disease of pulmonary interstitial tissue. Its incidence is increasing year by year in the world, and it will be further increased due to the pandemic of COVID-19. However, at present, there is no safe and effective treatment for this disease, so it is very meaningful to find drugs with high efficiency and less adverse reactions. The natural astragalus polysaccharide has the pharmacological effect of anti-pulmonary fibrosis with little toxic and side effects. At present, the mechanism of anti-pulmonary fibrosis of astragalus polysaccharide is not clear. Based on the network pharmacology and molecular docking method, this study analyzes the mechanism of Astragalus polysaccharides in treating pulmonary fibrosis, which provides a theoretical basis for its further clinical application. The active components of Astragalus polysaccharides were screened out by Swisstarget database, and the related targets of pulmonary fibrosis were screened out by GeneCards database. Protein-protein interaction network analysis and molecular docking were carried out to verify the docking affinity of active ingredients. At present, through screening, we have obtained 92 potential targets of Astragalus polysaccharides for treating pulmonary fibrosis, including 11 core targets. Astragalus polysaccharides has the characteristics of multi-targets and multi-pathways, and its mechanism of action may be through regulating the expression of VCAM1, RELA, CDK2, JUN, CDK1, HSP90AA1, NOS2, SOD1, CASP3, AHSA1, PTGER3 and other genes during the development of pulmonary fibrosis.
Highlights
Pulmonary fibrosis is caused by many causes, and it is a chronic, progressive and irreversible heterogeneous disease of pulmonary interstitial tissue (Raghu et al, 2011)
In order to analyze the interaction between the potential target genes and proteins of Astragalus polysaccharide in anti-pulmonary fibrosis, a PPI(proteinprotein interaction) network was built by STRING database, which was set as Homo sapiens and high confidence of 0.700, and the key targets were screened by visualization and network topology heterogeneity analysis in Cytoscape software
With the deepening of research on pulmonary fibrosis, the exploration of treating pulmonary fibrosis with traditional Chinese medicine has gradually increased, and great progress has been made in treating pulmonary fibrosis with traditional Chinese medicine, which has attracted much attention because of its multi-channels, multi-targets, few side effects and remarkable curative effect (Ji et al, 2020; Yu et al, 2020)
Summary
Pulmonary fibrosis is caused by many causes, and it is a chronic, progressive and irreversible heterogeneous disease of pulmonary interstitial tissue (Raghu et al, 2011). The main treatments for pulmonary fibrosis are drug therapy and lung transplantation. As for drug therapy, so far only Pirfenidone and Nidanib have been approved by FDA for the treatment of pulmonary fibrosis worldwide (Mora et al, 2017; Lederer and Martinez, 2018) These two anti-fibrosis drugs can improve patients’ lung function, but they still can’t cure pulmonary fibrosis and have obvious side effects, such as diarrhea and drug-induced liver injury, anorexia, vomiting and photosensitive rash, etc. Based on network pharmacology and molecular docking technology, this study preliminarily explored the mechanism of Astragalus polysaccharides in anti-pulmonary fibrosis, provided possible therapeutic drugs for the treatment of pulmonary fibrosis, and laid a theoretical foundation for the clinical application of Astragalus polysaccharides in anti-pulmonary fibrosis
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