Understanding the Molecular Mechanism of Interventions in Treating Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients with Corresponding Traditional Chinese Medicine Patterns Based on Bioinformatics Approach
Figure 2
Molecular network based mechanism of biomedicine therapy in treating RA. (a) shows the pharmacological networks of MTX + SSZ obtained with PPI analysis. Node represents protein; edge represents interaction. Left: whole pharmacological network of MTX + SSZ. Right: 11 highly connected clusters were obtained from PPI analysis, and the correlated pathways were shown in Table 1. The green nodes represent the proteins which could be targeted by either MTX or SSZ, or by the interaction between MTX and SSZ. (b) shows the merged networks of MTX + SSZ pharmacological networks and RA pattern networks. Node represents protein; edge represents interaction. Left part is for cold pattern, and right part for hot pattern. The dots between cold and hot pattern are the intersection between the two TCM patterns. The green nodes represent the proteins which could be targeted by either MTX or SSZ, or by the interaction between MTX and SSZ.