Putative herbal drugs for targeting infection and inflammatory diseases: Network pharmacological application in case of Zika virus and Dengue virus infections

Inflammation is the primary cause of many human diseases, including the Zika virus, Dengue infection, COVID-19 infection, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease, and tendinitis. Other diseases that are closely related to Dengue and Zika are also carried by the same kind of mosquitoes. Zika epidemics in human populations have just recently happened, but dengue fever is well-known and has long impacted people globally. When the inflammatory process is under control, it helps keep the body from disintegrating catastrophically; when it is not, it damages the body and results in unintentional deterioration. Given the importance of the pathways linked to inflammation, we have thus chosen to do research that may enable us to understand the function of these pathways and their constituent parts in cases of Dengue and Zika virus infection, as well as possible targets for herbal remedies. For a very long time, people have employed herbal treatments to treat or prevent ailments, including inflammatory problems. They are also an invaluable source of chemical building blocks that have developed into medicines that are necessary for contemporary health. It is of potential interest to understanding the gene expression patterns and the altered biological functions as a result of infection and to predict the potential drugs and the targets. Thus, to target those pathways using herbal drugs, we may have primarily investigated the shared/common pathways and the genes that comprise those processes in this study. By using in-silico approach, we have compared gene expression profiling, pathway enrichment analysis, network-level comprehension, projected potential genes and pathways, and performed docking for the top genes/proteins to predict the potential herbal drugs and the targets in order to achieve this using an integrated computational approach. Based on our analysis, we conclude that a large fraction of ZIKV and DENV DEGs overlap, and that all of the DENV-induced altered pathways exclusively belong to the ZIKV altered pathway list in terms of biological functions. These findings suggest that ZIKV and DENV infections are highly similar in terms of gene expression and possibly altered biological function levels. Furthermore, we performed docking profiling of the proteins inferred to chosen DEGs based on network analysis against the herbal medicines in order to discover potential targets for ZIKV and DENV infections with herbal medications. Fisetin appears to be the most promising among the three drugs selected with respect to Querceting and apigenin.