Abstract
While lung cancer poses a serious threat to human health, non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the most common type of lung cancer. Danggui Buxue Decoction (DBD) is a classical traditional antitumor medicine commonly used in China. However, the potential mechanism of DBD against NSCLC has not yet been expounded. Therefore, this study clarified the potential molecular mechanism and key targets of DBD in NSCLC treatment through several technological advances, such as network pharmacology, molecular docking, and bioinformatics. Firstly, the relative active ingredients and key DBD targets were analyzed, and subsequently, a drug-ingredient-target-disease network diagram was constructed for NSCLC treatment with DBD, resulting in the identification of five main active ingredients and ten core targets according to the enrichment degree. The enrichment analysis revealed that DBD can achieve the purpose of treating NSCLC through the AGE-RAGE signaling pathway in diabetic complications. Secondly, the molecular docking approach predicted that quercetin and hederagenin have the best working mechanisms with PDE3A and PTGS1, while the survival analysis results depicted that high PDE3A gene expression has a relatively poor prognosis for NSCLC patients (p < 0.05). Additionally, PDE3A is mainly distributed in the LU65 cell line that originated from Asian population. In summary, our study results showed that DBD can treat NSCLC through the synergistic correlation between multiple ingredients, multiple targets, and multiple pathways, thus effectively improving NSCLC prognosis. This study not only reflected the medicinal value of DBD but also provided a solid structural basis for future new drug developments and targeted therapies.
Highlights
According to the estimates from World Health Organization’s “Global Cancer Report 2020,” lung cancer (2.21 million cases) remains the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in the world [1]
Owing to the fact that there is no network pharmacology study in the literature to date on non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment with Danggui Buxue Decoction (DBD), this study explored the functional molecular mechanism of DBD in NSCLC treatment through network pharmacology and molecular docking as well as analyzed the survival of important targets through The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database to duly assess the target’s impact on NSCLC prognosis
The active ingredients and related targets of DBD were screened from the Traditional Chinese medicine systems pharmacology (TCMSP) database and further analyzed by GeneCards and OMIM databases to screen out the potential targets for NSCLC
Summary
According to the estimates from World Health Organization’s “Global Cancer Report 2020,” lung cancer (2.21 million cases) remains the second most commonly diagnosed cancer in the world [1]. The report predicts that by 2040, due to the incidence rate being 20%, the number of new cancer cases will exceed 27 million worldwide, with one in every five people suffering from cancer. In 2020, an estimated 4.57 million new cancer cases were reported in China, of which lung cancer is by far the leading cause of the highest number of reported cases at 23.7% and is still the most frequently occurring cancer threatening the health of the Chinese people [1,2,3]. The emergence of targeted therapy is being considered a boon for cancer patients, the resultant increase in drug resistance and unexplained incidence of allergic reactions
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