ABSTRACT
Objective: Pneumonia is an infectious inflammation of the alveoli,distal airway,and interstitium caused by bacterial,viral,and other pathogens. Maxing Shigantang,originated from Treatise On Cold Damage Diseases,is a classic prescription for treating pneumonia,with significant clinical efficacy. However,its treatment mechanism is still elusive. Method(s): In that paper,the transcriptome-based multi-scale network pharmacology was used to reveal the overall pharmacological mechanism of Maxing Shigantang in treating pneumonia from six scales of tissue,cell,pathological process,biological process,signaling pathway, and target. Result(s):At the tissue level,Maxing Shigantang mainly acted on the focal tissue of pneumonia-lung and the main inflammatory immune tissues-blood and spleen. Analysis of cell,pathological process and biological process suggested that Maxing Shigantang could treat pneumonia by reversing inflammatory and immune functions and improving cardiopulmonary and vascular injury caused by pneumonia. Analysis of signaling pathway and target showed that Maxing Shigantang regulated inflammatory immune response pathways such as "coronavirus disease-COVID-19" and "Toll-like receptor signaling pathway",and related targets such as "MAPKAPK3" and "NRG1". Conclusion(s):This paper,from molecular to tissue levels,indicated Maxing Shigantang treated pneumonia mainly by regulating inflammatory immune response and improving cardiopulmonary and vascular injury.Copyright © 2023, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences Institute of Chinese Materia Medica. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
To combat COVID-19, scientists must digest the vast amount of relevant biomedical knowledge in the literature to understand disease mechanisms and related biological functions. Nearly 3,000 scientific papers are published on PubMed every day. This knowledge bottleneck has resulted in severe delays in developing COVID-19 vaccines and drugs. Our research produces a hierarchy of knowledge concepts related to COVID-19, designed to assist scientists in answering questions and generating summaries. It aims to discover scientific and comprehensive knowledge to extract fine-grained multimedia elements (i.e., physical and visual structures, relational events and events, and chemical knowledge). Our project is toward one step in natural language understanding: detailed contextual sentences, subgraphs, and knowledge subgraphs are the first time to be automatically generated, and relations and coreferences of COVID-19 mentions will be sketched. Extensive results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we have published the generated knowledge graph on Google Drive1 and released the source in the Github2. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Since 2019, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has caused 6,319,395 deaths worldwide. Although the COVID-19 vaccine is currently available, the latest variant of the virus, Omicron, spreads more easily than earlier strains, and its mortality rate is still high in patients with chronic diseases, especially cancer patients. So, identifying a novel compound for COVID-19 treatment could help reduce the lethal rate of the viral infection in patients with cancer. This study applied network pharmacology and systematic bioinformatics analysis to determine the possible use of curcumol for treating colon adenocarcinoma (COAD) in patients infected with COVID-19. Our results showed that COVID-19 and COAD in patients shared a cluster of genes commonly deregulated by curcumol. The clinical pathological analyses demonstrated that the expression of gamma-aminobutyric acid receptor subunit delta (GABRD) was associated with the patients' hazard ratio. More importantly, the high expression of GABRD was associated with poor survival rates and the late stages of COAD in patients. The network pharmacology result identified seven-core targets, including solute carrier family 6 member 3, gamma-aminobutyric acid receptor subunit pi, butyrylcholinesterase, cytochrome P450 3A4, 17-beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2, progesterone receptor, and GABRD of curcumol for treating patients with COVID-19 and COAD. The bioinformatic analysis further highlighted their importance in the biological processes and molecular functions in gland development, inflammation, retinol, and steroid metabolism. The findings of this study suggest that curcumol could be an alternative compound for treating patients with COVID-19 and COAD.
ABSTRACT
Interferon (IFN) was first introduced by Isaacs and Linddeman in 1957. It referred to a factor that could cause inhibition in the growth of the live influenza virus. Interferons are intracellular proteins that are involved in many cellular processes such as growth, proliferation, differentiation, metabolism of the extracellular matrix, apoptosis, and regulating immune responses. There are different intereferones. Amog them, interferons-beta (IFN-β) is a natural cytokine produced by immune cells in response to biological and chemical stimuli. Signal transduction of IFN-β is initiated throughout a heterodimeric receptor complex that is composed of IFNAR1 and IFNAR2;which leads to expression of various proteins via the Janus kinase (JAK)-signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) pathway as well as other pathways. In addition to antiviral effects of IFN-β, it has been shown to have therapeutic effects in some autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. It has recently been shown that the use of IFN-β in combination with other antiviral compounds may be effective in treatment of Covid-19. In this review the various topics about IFN-β are investigated such as signalling pathways, biological functions, therapeutic effects, and side effects of IFN-β therapy.
ABSTRACT
Lectins are widely distributed proteins having ability of binding selectively and reversibly with carbohydrates moieties and glycoconjugates. Although lectins have been reported from different biological sources, the legume lectins are the best-characterized family of plant lectins. Legume lectins are a large family of homologous proteins with considerable similarity in amino acid sequence and their tertiary structures. Despite having strong sequence conservation, these lectins show remarkable variability in carbohydrate specificity and quaternary structures. The ability of legume lectins in recognizing glycans and glycoconjugates on cells and other intracellular structures make them a valuable research tool in glycomic research. Due to variability in binding with glycans, glycoconjugates and multiple biological functions, legume lectins are the subject of intense research for their diverse application in different fields such as glycobiology, biomedical research and crop improvement. The present review specially focuses on structural and functional characteristics of legume lectins along with their potential areas of application.