Integrative Pharmacology Strategy Powers the Delineation of the Main Active Components and Exploration the Underlying Mechanism of WBT Acting on Rheumatoid Arthritis

Wang Bi Tablet (WBT) exhibits effective power in clinic during the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in China. We aimed to employ the “integrative pharmacology strategy”, including rapid analysis of chemical composition, pharmacological experiment, and network pharmacology analysis, to delineate the main active components and reveal the underlying mechanism of WBT acting on RA. UPLC-QTOF-MS/MS provided the chemical fingerprint of WBT and UNIFI 1.8 software assisted in chemical composition identification by matching the MSE raw data to the in-house library. The anti-inflammatory effect of WBT was evaluated in TNF-α- stimulated RAW264.7 cells by ELISA and transcriptome sequencing. Network pharmacology analysis was carried out based on Integrative Pharmacology-based Network Computational Research Platform of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCMIP V2.0, http://www.tcmip.cn/). Functional enrichment and network visualization was performed by DAVID v6.8 and NaviGator v3.0 respectively. Altogether, 293 chemical constituents were preliminarily identified or tentatively characterized in the extract of WBT, and it could effectively against inflammatory response in TNF-α-stimulated RAW264.7 cells. One hundred and thirty-five hub genes were delineated based on the network construction of “Anti-inflammatory Core Genes-Putative Targets-RA genes”, which were mainly involved in inflammation-immune regulation, closely relating to the occurrence and development of RA, such as Cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, Chemokine signaling pathway, etc., Forty-eight key active constituents were selected according to the frequency binding to hub targets and contents in WBT, corresponding to 13 herbal medicines. In summary, it is the first time to explore the active constituents and underlying mechanism of WBT acting on RA using integrative pharmacology strategy, which may provide an efficient way for the analysis of chemical constituents and exploration of pharmacological mechanism of TCM. Based on RAW264.7 cells (mouse origin), blank group, induction group (inflammatory factors), WBT group. We want to obtain differentially expressed genes among each group, and further analyze the mechanism of drug efficacy.