Network pharmacology-based elucidation of molecular biological mechanisms of Qizhu Yuling Decoction for treatment of esophagus cancer

Objective: To investigate the active compounds, key targets and molecular mechanism of Qizhu Yuling Decoction in the treatment of esophageal carcinoma based on network pharmacology. Methods: The active compounds of Qizhu Yuling Decoction with antiesophageal cancer activity were screened by TCMSP and literature search, and the drug targets were searched by DrugBank and predicted by SwissTargetPrediction. The esophageal cancer-related genes were obtained from GeneCards, OMIM, DrugBank, TTD, DisGeNET, and the intersection network was selected to obtain candidate genes. The "herb-compoundtarget- disease" network was constructed with Cytoscape, the PPI network was constructed in STRING and core network modules were screened. Gene ontology and KEGG enrichment analysis was performed by using Metascape, and the "pathway-gene" network was constructed to further screen key targets. Results: A total of 47 active compounds (19 Astragalus, 4 Zedoary turmeric, 11 Atractylodes macrocephala, 9 Curcuma longa, 5 Clematis root, and 5 Salvia chinensis), 297 candidate genes, 2413 GO and 119 KEGG pathways were obtained. Conclusion: The active compounds of Qizhu Yuling Decoction in the treatment of esophageal cancer are quercetin, kaempferol, glycine and ursolic acid. The potential targets are AKT1, MAPK1, MAPK3, PIK3R1 and RELA. GO involves oxidative stress, cell cycle, apoptosis and cell death, and KEGG involves typical cancer pathways, MAPK, NF-κB and PI3K-Akt signaling pathways. This study reveals the molecular biological mechanism of Qizhu Yuling Decoction in the treatment of esophageal cancer, and speculates that the function of potential targets focuses on the interaction of multiple signaling pathways, which can antagonize the proliferation, invasion, metastasis and recurrence of esophageal cancer and improve the prognosis of patients. This study provides new evidence for subsequent new drug development, clinical application and experimental study