Herbal Medicine Resources Research Center, Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine, Naju 58245, Republic of Korea.
Division of Horticultural Science, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju 52725, Republic of Korea.
Int J Mol Sci. 2023 Dec 21;25(1):156. doi: 10.3390/ijms25010156.
Cachexia is a devastating fat tissue and muscle wasting syndrome associated with every major chronic illness, including cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, kidney disease, AIDS, and heart failure. Despite two decades of intense research, cachexia remains under-recognized by oncologists. While numerous drug candidates have been proposed for cachexia treatment, none have achieved clinical success. Only a few drugs are approved by the FDA for cachexia therapy, but a very low success rate is observed among patients. Currently, the identification of drugs from herbal medicines is a frontier research area for many diseases. In this milieu, network pharmacology, transcriptomics, cheminformatics, and molecular docking approaches were used to identify potential bioactive compounds from herbal medicines for the treatment of cancer-related cachexia. The network pharmacology approach is used to select the 32 unique genes from 238 genes involved in cachexia-related pathways, which are targeted by 34 phytocompounds identified from 12 different herbal medicines used for the treatment of muscle wasting in many countries. Gene expression profiling and functional enrichment analysis are applied to decipher the role of unique genes in cancer-associated cachexia pathways. In addition, the pharmacological properties and molecular interactions of the phytocompounds were analyzed to find the target compounds for cachexia therapy. Altogether, combined omics and network pharmacology approaches were used in the current study to untangle the complex prognostic genes involved in cachexia and phytocompounds with anti-cachectic efficacy. However, further functional and experimental validations are required to confirm the efficacy of these phytocompounds as commercial drug candidates for cancer-associated cachexia.
恶病质是一种破坏性的脂肪组织和肌肉消耗综合征,与每一种主要的慢性疾病都有关联,包括癌症、慢性阻塞性肺疾病、肾病、艾滋病和心力衰竭。尽管经过了 20 年的深入研究,恶病质仍然没有被肿瘤学家充分认识。虽然已经提出了许多候选药物来治疗恶病质,但没有一种药物取得了临床成功。只有少数几种药物被 FDA 批准用于恶病质治疗,但在患者中观察到的成功率非常低。目前,从草药中识别药物是许多疾病的前沿研究领域。在这种情况下,网络药理学、转录组学、化学信息学和分子对接方法被用于从草药中识别治疗癌症相关恶病质的潜在生物活性化合物。网络药理学方法用于从涉及恶病质相关途径的 238 个基因中选择 32 个独特基因,这些基因是从 12 种不同的草药中确定的 34 种植物化合物所针对的,这些草药被用于治疗许多国家的肌肉消耗。基因表达谱分析和功能富集分析被用于破译独特基因在癌症相关恶病质途径中的作用。此外,还分析了植物化合物的药理学特性和分子相互作用,以找到治疗恶病质的靶化合物。总的来说,本研究采用了综合组学和网络药理学方法来梳理涉及恶病质的复杂预后基因和具有抗恶病质疗效的植物化合物。然而,还需要进一步的功能和实验验证来确认这些植物化合物作为癌症相关恶病质的商业候选药物的疗效。