Analysis of the potential and mechanism of Ginkgo biloba in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease based on network pharmacology

Abstract

Objective Study the principle and possible mechanism of Ginkgo biloba in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD) which is based on network pharmacology. Methods The potential targets of active ingredients of Ginkgo biloba were collected by Traditional Chinese Medicine Integrated Database platform (TCMSP). TCMSP is a pharmacological system for drug discovery from Chinese herbal medicine. The disease targets of AD were searched and collected by the database of gene‐disease associations (DisGeNET) and literature. The obtained targets were standardized by the UniProt database. STING network platform and Cytoscape were used to construct protein‐protein interaction network (PPI) of the key targets. According to Materscape, we clarify the possible mechanism of action including Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway and Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis. Results The compound‐target network contains 27 active ingredients, 191 related targets, 18 key targets, including PLAU, HMOX1, TNF, INSR, MPO, MAOB, IGF2, IL1B, ESR1, BCL2, ACHE, BAX, GSK3B, PPARG, SLC2A4, NOS3, CASP3, VEGFA. GO enrichment analysis has got a total of 640 GO items, including 609 biological process (BP) items (95.1%), 16 molecular function (MF) items (2.5%) and 15 cellular component (CC) items (2.4%). After KEGG enrichment, 44 pathways were obtained. Conclusion Through the construction of “component‐target‐pathway”, GO biological function and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis were performed on core targets, and the possibility of Ginkgo biloba for the treatment of AD was explored from multiple targets and pathways, which provided a new approach for multi‐target treatment.

Keywords

• Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease
• Network pharmacology approach
• Mechanism of Ginkgo Biloba
• Gene ontology