Our data demonstrate that B. lactis inhibits NF-kappaB and NF-kappaB-regulated genes in IEC and prevents acute colitis and CAC in mice. These results suggest that B. lactis could be a potential preventive agent for CAC as well as a therapeutic agent for inflammatory bowel disease.
Background
In recent years, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and alternative medicine have been widely used along with western drugs as a complementary form of treatment. In this study, we first use the scientific literature to identify western drugs with obvious side effects. Then, we find TCM alternatives for these western drugs to ameliorate their side effects.
Results
We used depression as a case study. To evaluate our method, we showed the relation between herb-ingredients-target-disease for representative alternative herbs of western drugs. Further, a protein-protein interaction network of western drugs and alternative herbs was produced, and we performed enrichment analysis of the targets of the active ingredients of the herbs and examined the enrichment of Gene Ontology terms for Biological Process, Cellular Component, and Molecular Function and KEGG Pathway levels, to show how these targets affect different levels of gene expression.
Conclusion
Our proposed method is able to select herbs that are highly relevant to the target indication (depression) and are able to treat the side effects caused by the target drug. The compounds from our selected alternative herbal medicines can therefore be complementary to the western drugs and ameliorate their side effects, which may help in the development of new drugs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.