Study on Yueju Wan for "different diseases with same treatment" based on integrative pharmacology

Abstract

The traditional Chinese medicine prescription Yueju Wan has the function of regulating qi-flowing for activating stagnancy and resolving food stagnation, which is now used for the treatment of depression and gastrointestinal related diseases. In this study, an integrative pharmacological method was adopted to predict the targets and pathways of Yueju Wan and explore its molecular mechanism for depression and gastrointestinal dysfunction with the same treatment. First, disease targets were collected from Human Phenotype Ontology database, 201 targets related to depression and 474 targets related to gastrointestinal dysfunction, including 95 common targets of these two. Then, the integrative pharmacology platform of traditional Chinese medicine (TCMIP) was used to predict and analyze the drug targets, GO function, KEGG pathway, core targets network of Yueju Wan and heterogeneous network of TCM-chemical components-key drug targets-pathway. According to the integrative analysis, it is found that ATP1A1, KRAS, and PRKAA1 were key targets, and neuron apoptotic process, neurotrophin signaling pathway, serotonergic synapse and regulation of nitric-oxide synthase activity were key pathways which played important roles in molecular mechanism of Yueju Wan for depression and gastrointestinal dysfunction. In conclusion, speculated serotonergic synapse and regulation of nitric-oxide synthase activity maybe the common process in depression and gastrointestinal dysfunction. This paper provided an overall understanding on Yueju Wan based on TCMIP, helping to elucidate the mechanism of the same treatment for different diseases, depression and gastrointestinal dysfunction.