Modular characteristics and mechanism of action of herbs for vascular calcification treatment in Chinese medicine: a data mining and network pharmacology-based identification

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate the modular charac-teristics and mechanism of action of Chinese herbs for vascular calcification (VC) treatment.MATERIALS AND METHODS: Network pharma-cology coupled with literature data mining was uti-lized to assess the Chinese herbal clinical perfor-mance as well as its similarity, characteristics, in-gredient, target, and Gene Ontology (GO) analysis, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment, and network construction.RESULTS: The top 15 medications from the lit-erature, according to the usage, and 190 active chemicals, 183 common targets between medi-cation and VC-related targets were weeded out. Analysis of the relationships between the active in-gredients, pharmacological targets, and signaling pathways helped to clearly define the therapeutic effect of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Im-portantly, we discovered seven most hub proteins (AKT1, CTNNB1, TNF, EGFR, TP53, JUN and IL-6) and two of the herbs' most fundamental ingredi-ents (Formononetin and Luteolin) in TCM-mediat-ed VC suppression. Mechanistically, the metabolic pathways [AGE-RAGE pathway, interleukin-17 (IL -17) pathway, and p53 pathway] as well as smooth muscle adaptation (functional remodeling) and ox-idoreductase activity (redox homeostasis modu-lating) are also crucially implicated.CONCLUSIONS: Our work, accomplished by network pharmacology and data mining, in-creases our understanding of TCM in VC ther-apy and may offer insightful information for fu-ture drug discovery investigations.