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.