A Practical Strategy for Exploring the Pharmacological Mechanism of Chrysophanol Against Obesity Asthma/Childhood Asthma Comorbidity

Background: and purpose Obesity may be more likely to lead to asthma, that is, obesity asthma. Children are the age stage of high incidence of asthma. Obesity asthma may be more refractory in children with asthma, and is more likely to produce glucocorticoid resistance, which greatly leads to the risk of severe disease in children with asthma. However, approaches to combating Obesity Asthma/Childhood Asthma complications are limited by conditions. Existing evidence shows that chrysophanol has antibacterial and anti-inflammatory, fat reduction, anticough, promoting gastrointestinal functional homeostasis and immune regulation. Experimental methods Through systematic pharmacological and bioinformatics analysis, we evaluated the physical and chemical properties and biological activities of chrysophanol, and further analyzed its binding activities, targets, biological functions and mechanisms. Key results It was found that chrysophanol can play the ideal physical and chemical properties and biological activities. The PPI network screened 144 common targets of drugs and diseases, and 15 hub targets were obtained. Then, the top 10 hub targets were identified, namely EGFR, HSP90AA1, ESR1, HIF1A, STAT3, SRC, PTGS2, MTOR, MMP9, PIK3CA, and verified in the protein-ligand blind docking. Enrichment analysis showed that chrysophanol may be involved in inflammation regulation, EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor resistance, HIF-1 signaling pathway, Neutrophil extracellular trap formation，and so on. Conclusions and implications Our fingdings indicate that chrysophanol can reduce airway inflammation and remodeling through multi-pathway and multi-target, and provide evidence for the application of chrysophanol in Obesity Asthma/Childhood Asthma comorbidities. The predicted results will be strictly verified by experiments.