Multiscale Modeling of Drug-induced Effects of ReDuNing Injection on Human Disease: From Drug Molecules to Clinical Symptoms of Disease

Abstract

ReDuNing injection (RDN) is a patented traditional Chinese medicine, and the components of it were proven to have antiviral and important anti-inflammatory activities. Several reports showed that RDN had potential effects in the treatment of influenza and pneumonia. Though there were several experimental reports about RDN, the experimental results were not enough and complete due to that it was difficult to predict and verify the effect of RDN for a large number of human diseases. Here we employed multiscale model by integrating molecular docking, network pharmacology and the clinical symptoms information of diseases and explored the interaction mechanism of RDN on human diseases. Meanwhile, we analyzed the relation among the drug molecules, target proteins, biological pathways, human diseases and the clinical symptoms about it. Then we predicted potential active ingredients of RDN, the potential target proteins, the key pathways and related diseases. These attempts may offer several new insights to understand the pharmacological properties of RDN and provide benefit for its new clinical applications and research.

Network Pharmacology

“…NP also serves to document and analyze the clinical prescriptions of traditional medicine practitioners . A traditional medicine network that links bioactives to clinical symptoms through targets and diseases is a novel way to explore the basic principles of traditional medicines (Luo et al, 2015).…”

Reduning injection combined with western medicine for pneumonia

“…In recent years, it has been treated with the combination of TCM (such as Reduning injection) and Western medicine, and its mortality has decreased significantly. [ 5 , 9 – 11 ] TCM injection is the main type of TCM for syndrome differentiation of TCM therapy, but its effect is relatively slow. [ 10 , 11 ] Although Western medicine routine treatment has quick effect and remarkable effect, it also has shortcomings such as drug resistance and is not suitable for long-term use.…”

“…[ 11 ] Reduning injection has achieved a certain effect in clinical treatment of acute bronchitis and upper respiratory tract infection. [ 5 , 9 – 11 ] In the course of the outbreak of COVID-19, Reduning injection is widely used to treat severe patients with COVID-19 in China, which is also recommended for use in the Guideline on Diagnosis and Treatment of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Revised 7th version) officially issued by National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China. [ 6 – 8 ] Western medicine routine treatment mainly uses antibiotics (penicillins, cephalosporins, macrolides, and aminoglycosides etc.)…”

Combining Chemical Profiling and Network Analysis to Investigate the Pharmacology of Complex Prescriptions in Traditional Chinese Medicine

“…However, the complicated chemical composition also brings great difficulties to the pharmacological investigations of TCM prescriptions. Network pharmacology, which was first proposed by Hopkins2, offers an ideal paradigm to deal with multi-target combination drugs and has recently been successfully adopted to investigate the formulae in TCM34567. The core of the scheme is the construction and analysis of the pharmacological network, which is normally composed of the nodes of active ingredients, the nodes of candidate protein targets, the nodes of intermediate proteins transferring protein-protein interactions (PPI) and the connections (i.e., edges) between them.…”