Therapeutic Targets and Mechanism of Banxia Xiexin Decoction on Precancerous Lesions of Gastric Cancer: Network pharmacology

BackgroundPrecancerous Lesions of Gastric Cancer (PLGC) is a common gastrointestinal tract and digestive systemdisease that lacks effective therapeutic drugs with good curative effects and few adverse reactions. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has the advantages of multiple components, multiple channels, and fewer adverse reactions in the treatment of PLGC. Although Banxia xiexin Decoction (BXD) demonstrates a good therapeutic effect on PLGC, the pharmacological mechanism underlying its anticancer effect is still unclear. MethodsWe used a network pharmacology strategy, including the construction and analysis of a complex drug-disease network, to explore the complex mechanism of BXD treatment of PLGC. In addition, molecular docking technology was used to preliminarily study the binding ability of the potential active components and core therapeutic targets of BXD. ResultsThe networkpharmacology results showed 80 targets of BXD that are involved in PLGC. PPI network analysis demonstrated that the top10 core targets were JUN, TP53, MAPK3, MAPK1, TNF, VEGFA, MAPK14, ESR1, NR3C1, and MAPK8. The GO enrichment analysis results showed that the BXD anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory mechanism mainly involves cellular response to organic cyclic compound, response to toxic substance, response to oxidative stress, cellular response to nitrogen compound, response to inorganic substance, and others. The KEGG analysis results indicated that BXD may regulate 167 pathways such as MAPK signaling pathway and pathway in cancer in the treatment of PLGC. The molecular docking resultsshowed that the binding energies of beta sitosterol withMAPK1, MAPK3, MAPK14, JUN, and VEGFA were less than−7.0 kcal·mol−1, indicating a good docking effect. ConclusionsThis study reflects the characteristics of the mechanism of action by which BXD treats PLGC, which includes multiple components, multiple targets, and multiple pathways, and provides a biological basis for further verification and a novel perspective for drug discoveryin PLGC.