Aim and Objective:
Cardiovascular disease is a serious threat to human health because of its
high mortality and morbidity rates. At present, there is no effective treatment. In Southeast Asia, traditional
Chinese medicine is widely used in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Quercetin is a flavonoid
extract of Ginkgo biloba leaves. Basic experiments and clinical studies have shown that quercetin has a
significant effect on the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, its precise mechanism is still
unclear. Therefore, it is necessary to exploit the network pharmacological potential effects of quercetin on
cardiovascular disease.
Materials and Methods:
In the present study, a novel network pharmacology strategy based on
pharmacokinetic filtering, target fishing, Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and
Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analysis, compound-target-pathway network structured was
performed to explore the anti- cardiovascular disease mechanism of quercetin.
Results::
The outcomes showed that quercetin possesses favorable pharmacokinetic profiles, which have
interactions with 47 cardiovascular disease-related targets and 12 KEGG signaling pathways to provide
potential synergistic therapeutic effects. Following the construction of Compound-Target-Pathway (C-T-P)
network, and the network topological feature calculation, we obtained top 10 core genes in this network
which were AKT1, IL1B, TNF, IL6, JUN, CCL2, FOS, VEGFA, CXCL8, and ICAM1. KEGG pathway
enrichment analysis. These indicated that quercetin produced the therapeutic effects against cardiovascular
disease by systemically and holistically regulating many signaling pathways, including Fluid shear stress
and atherosclerosis, AGE-RAGE signaling pathway in diabetic complications, TNF signaling pathway,
MAPK signaling pathway, IL-17 signaling pathway and PI3K-Akt signaling pathway.
