Introduction
Novel coronavirus pneumonia, known as SARS-CoV-2, is a severe and
life-threatening epidemic disease, leaving gigantic economic burden and
increasing death toll in the word [1]. As an evolving epidemic, NPC
is rapidly growing and spreading around the countries, including United
States, Brazil, India [2]. Epidemiological evidences suggest that
the trend of NPC infection is hard to control due to the insufficient
management against NPC, characterized with huge infected cases in
different countries [3]. In USA, NPC have already affected millions
of population and is characterized with mounting incidence and
death-rateĀ [4]. Pathologically, the main clinical characteristics of
NPC are related to inflammation, cytokine storms, immunodefficiency,
infection [5]. In clinical management against NPC, the common
therapy may have supportive care [6], such as breathing assistance,
as the developed drug and new vaccine are still ongoing [7].
Traditionally, Pueraria montana (Gegen) is found with relieving
muscle fever, neutralizing alcoholism hypoglycemic, and hypolipemic
actions [8]. Puerarin, rich in Pueraria montana , exerts
evident pharmacological benefits, such as preventing coronary heart
disease, anti-alcoholism, anti-diabetes [9]. In our previous
reports, puerarin is found with potent hepatoprotection,
neuroprotection, and anti-dysmetabolism effect in preclinical studies
[10-13]. There is an interesting report suggest that puerarin may
function as a natural amoebicidal agent to manageAcanthamoeba -induced pneumonia [14]. In addition, puerarin
plays the important role of anti-inflammatory action, including
preventing acute lung injury through reducing inflammatory stress
[15-16]. However, there is no specific drug for treatment of NPC
currently. Although some antiviral drugs and traditional Chinese
medicine have been used in clinical treatment of NPC, the therapeutic
effectiveness is not clear. Collectively, we aimed to determine and
identify the curative effect of puerarin to treat NPC, as well as the
therapeutic mechanisms involved would be revealed. It is of great
interesting to use the bioinformatics and computational methods based on
network pharmacology for unveiling the potential agent to treat illness
[17]. By using the network pharmacology strategy, we have been
reported the pharmacological targets and molecular pathways of bioactive
agents against complex diseases [18-19]. Thus, in this
bioinformatics report, we intended to revealment of a
component-target-pathway network and pharmacological mechanism of
puerarin to treat NPC.