Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology. 1. In Silico Prediction of Drug-Target Interaction of Natural Products Enables New Targeted Cancer Therapy

摘要

Natural products with diverse chemical scaffolds have been recognized as an invaluable source of compounds in drug discovery and development. However, systematic identification of drug targets for natural products at the human proteome level via various experimental assays is highly expensive and time-consuming. In this study, we proposed a systems pharmacology infrastructure to predict new drug targets and anticancer indications of natural products. Specifically, we reconstructed a global drug-target network with 7,314 interactions connecting 751 targets and 2,388 natural products and built predictive network models via a balanced substructure-drug-target network-based inference approach. A high area under receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.96 was yielded for predicting new targets of natural products during cross-validation. The newly predicted targets of natural products (e.g., resveratrol, genistein and kaempherol) with high scores were validated by various literatures. We further built the statistical network models for identification of new anticancer indications of natural products through integration of both experimentally validated and computationally predicted drug-target interactions of natural products with the known cancer proteins. We showed that the significantly predicted anticancer indications of multiple natural products (e.g., naringenin, disulfiram and metformin) with new mechanism-of-action were validated by various published experimental evidences. In summary, this study offers powerful computational systems pharmacology approaches and tools for development of novel targeted cancer therapies by exploiting the polypharmacology of natural products.