Systematic Investigation of Scutellariae Barbatae Herba for Treating Hepatocellular Carcinoma Based on Network Pharmacology

Abstract

As the fifth most common type of malignant cancers globally, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the second leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. As a long-time medicinal herb in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Scutellariae Barbatae Herba (SBH) has also been used for treating various cancers including HCC, but its underlying mechanisms have not been completely clarified. Presently, an innovative network-pharmacology platform was introduced to systematically elucidate the pharmacological mechanisms of SBH against HCC, adopting active ingredients prescreening, target fishing, and network analysis. The results revealed that SBH appeared to work on HCC probably through regulating 4 molecular functions, 20 biological processes, and hitting on 21 candidate targets involved in 40 pathways. By in-depth analysis of the first-ranked signaling pathway and hit genes, only TTR was highly and specially expressed in the liver tissue. TTR might play a crucial role in neutrophil degranulation pathway during SBH against HCC. Hence, TTR might become a therapeutic target of HCC. The study investigated the anti-hepatoma mechanisms of SBH from a holistic perspective, which provided a theoretical foundation for further experimental research and rational clinical application of SBH.

Antitumor Effects and the Compatibility Mechanisms of Herb Pair Scleromitrion diffusum (Willd.) R. J. Wang–Sculellaria barbata D. Don

“…In recent years, network pharmacology analysis was successfully used to predict the underlying function mechanisms of TCM formulas for cancer, depression, and cardiovascular disease treatment (Zhao et al, 2019). Network pharmacology is a systems biology-based methodology for evaluating pharmacokinetics (ADME properties of drugs) and target prediction, as well as investigating the multipharmacological effects of traditional medicines at the molecular level (Di et al, 2018;Gong et al, 2018).…”

Top-100 Most Cited Publications Concerning Network Pharmacology: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Pathway and network analysis and protein-protein interactions are common methods for NP [6–8, 23]. Oral bioavailability [24] is an essential parameter for drug absorption and utilization; therefore, NP studies commonly use this alone or in combination with other parameters, including drug likeness, Caco-2 permeability, and drug half-life, as filters to select compounds from herbs [6, 7, 25]. Other methods, such as molecular docking, are also used in many NP studies [6, 23].…”

“…Bing et al [6] used NP methods to indicate that licochalcone a and beta-sitosterol in Fuzhengkangai were active compounds to overcome drug resistance. Gong et al [25] found that TTR might be a potential treating target of hepatocellular carcinoma by using NP methods. Therefore, we can conclude that current NP research mainly focused on NP methods (including experimental validation) and using them to explore the molecular mechanisms of TCM for some critical diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancers.…”

Deciphering the Molecular Targets and Mechanisms of HGWD in the Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis via Network Pharmacology and Molecular Docking

“…TCMSP is a unique system pharmacology database of Chinese herbal medicines with data on absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME)-related parameters of herbal ingredients as well as the relationships between diseases, targets, ingredients, and drugs [ 18 ]. The active compounds of HGWD were primarily screened based on oral bioavailability (OB) and drug-like (DL) properties, the two important indicators for bioinformatics evaluation of ADME characteristics [ 19 ]. The OB is a major pharmacokinetic parameter of oral drugs and is the proportion of oral drug dose in the systemic circulation [ 20 ].…”