Systems Pharmacology-Based Method to Assess the Mechanism of Action of Weight-Loss Herbal Intervention Therapy for Obesity

Abstract

Obesity is a multi-factorial chronic disease that has become a serious, prevalent, and refractory public health challenge globally because of high rates of various complications. Traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) as a functional food are considered to be a valuable and readily available resource for treating obesity because of their better therapeutic effects and reduced side effects. However, their “multi-compound” and “multi-target” features make it extremely difficult to interpret the potential mechanism underlying the anti-obesity effects of TCMs from a holistic perspective. An innovative systems-pharmacology approach was employed, which combined absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion screening and multiple target fishing, gene ontology enrichment analysis, network pharmacology, and pathway analysis to explore the potential therapeutic mechanism of weight-loss herbal intervention therapy in obesity and related diseases. The current study provides a promising approach to facilitate the development and discovery of new botanical drugs.

An Integrated Pharmacology-Based Analysis for Antidepressant Mechanism of Chinese Herbal Formula Xiao-Yao-San

“…Systems pharmacology is an emerging field that integrates bioinformatics and experimental methods to advance drug discovery and provides a method for clarification of mechanisms of action of Chinese herbs (Berger and Iyengar, 2009). A drug (active compounds)-targets-diseases (clinical symptoms) network can be constructed and analyzed using a holistic view though this method (Kim et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2019). It can determine the enrichment of targets, and elucidate complex effects and pharmacological mechanisms of Chinese herbs (Kloft et al, 2016).…”

Investigation of the Lipid-Lowering Mechanisms and Active Ingredients of Danhe Granule on Hyperlipidemia Based on Systems Pharmacology

“…Besides, DHG treatment not only inhibited the fat accumulation in the liver, but also inversed the increase of body weight gain, liver index, and related adipose tissue weight in hyperlipidemic hamsters, which further confirmed that the DHG had a beneficial lipidlowering effect. Systems pharmacology has gradually become an effective method to study the active components and mechanisms of action of TCM (Zhou et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019). Different from most of the previous studies that usually consider ingredients from herbal databases, we take the compounds that are detected in the hamster blood as the compound source to carry out systems pharmacology research.…”

“…In TCM formula, the characteristics "multi-component, multi-target, and multi-pathway" present a tremendous challenge in understanding of the interactions between components and their mechanisms of action (Jiang et al, 2019). Fortunately, systems pharmacology, as a new discipline based on the basic theories of pharmacology and systems biology pharmacology, integrating pharmacology feature mapping, multiple targeting techniques, network pharmacology, and pathway analyses, has gradually become a powerful tool to investigate the therapeutic mechanisms of TCM (Su et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2019). For example, Liu et al found 33 compounds with potential anticancer effects from Scutellaria barbata D. Don and investigated their mechanisms in treating non-small cell lung cancer by systems pharmacology method (Liu et al, 2018).…”

Efficacy of Chinese Herbal Formula Sini Zuojin Decoction in Treating Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease: Clinical Evidence and Potential Mechanisms

“…To collect the chemical compounds of all the herbs contained in SNZJD, we performed a search of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Systems Pharmacology Database (TCMSP, http://tcmspw.com/ index.php). According to some research (Liu et al, 2013;Zhou et al, 2019), the average oral bioavailability (OB) value is 30%, and its variability is 10-50%; the drug-like index (DL) is stable at over 0.18. We therefore used OB ≥ 50% and DL ≥ 0.18 as filtering for thresholds.…”