Potential therapeutic effect of Saussureae Involucratae Herba on breast cancer and its mechanism based on network pharmacology

As one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in the world, female breast cancer is induced by the high level of estrogen. Saussureae Involucratae Herba(SIH), a gynecological medicinal, regulates estrogen-induced diseases. However, the therapeutic effect of SIH on breast cancer has not been reported. Therefore, this study aims to explore the potential efficacy of SIH on breast cancer based on in vitro experiment and network pharmacology. The inhibitory effect of SIH water extract on proliferation and migration of breast cancer MDA-MB-231 cells was examined. The result demonstrated SIH water extract significantly suppressed the proliferation of breast cancer cells(IC_(50)=6.47 mg·mL~(-1)) and also restricted the migration. A total of 39 components of SIH were retrieved from traditional Chinese medicine database(TCMD) and 160 targets of SIH were screened by target fishing with the PharmaDB database. The Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man(OMIM) was used to establish a 1 001-targets data set of breast cancer. Based on the overlaps(45) of targets between SIH and breast cancer, a protein-protein interaction(PPI) network was built to analyze the interactions among these targets with STRING platform and Cytoscape. Finally, through topology and GO and KEGG analysis, 8 targets, 101 pathways and 85 biological processes were found to involve the treatment of breast cancer by SIH. SIH may exert the anti-breast cancer effect by regulating cell cycle, inhibiting proliferation, migration and adhesion of cancer cells, and modulating estrogen receptor. This study clarified the mechanism of SIH in treating breast cancer, which lays a foundation for the further development of SIH.