Butein, a potential drug for the treatment of bone cancer pain through bioinformatic and network pharmacology

Bone cancer pain is a difficult-to-treat pathologic condition that impairs the patient's quality of life. The effective therapy options for BCP are restricted due to the unknown pathophysiology. Transcriptome data were obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus database and differentially expressed gene extraction was performed. DEGs integrated with pathological targets found 68 genes in the study. Butein was discovered as a possible medication for BCP after the 68 genes were submitted to the Connectivity Map 2.0 database for drug prediction. Moreover, butein has good drug-likeness properties. To collect the butein targets, we used the CTD, SEA, TargetNet, and Super-PRED databases. Furthermore, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway enrichment analyses revealed butein's pharmacological effects, indicating that butein may aid in treating BCP by altering the hypoxia-inducible factor, NF-kappa B, angiogenesis, and sphingolipid signaling pathways. Moreover, the pathological targets integrated with drug targets were obtained as the shared gene set A, which was analyzed by ClueGO and MCODE. Biological process analysis and MCODE algorithm further analyzed that BCP related targets were mainly involved in signal transduction process and ion channel-related pathways. Next, we integrated targets related to network topology parameters and targets of core pathways, identified PTGS2, EGFR, JUN, ESR1, TRPV1, AKT1 and VEGFA as butein regulated hub genes by molecular docking, which play a critical role in its analgesic effect. This study lays the scientific groundwork for elucidating the mechanism underlying butein's success in the treatment of BCP.

Forced Degradation Studies of Ivabradine and In Silico Toxicology Predictions for Its New Designated Impurities

All activities should aim to eliminate genotoxic impurities and/or protect the API against degradation. There is a necessity to monitor impurities from all classification groups, hence ivabradine forced degradation studies were performed. Ivabradine was proved to be quite durable active substance, but still new and with insufficient stability data. Increased temperature, acid, base, oxidation reagents and light were found to cause its degradation. Degradation products were determined with the usage of HPLC equipped with Q-TOF-MS detector. Calculations of pharmacological and toxicological properties were performed for six identified degradation products. Target prediction algorithm was applied on the basis of Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated cation channels, as well as more general parameters like logP and aqueous solubility. Ames test and five cytochromes activities were calculated for toxicity assessment for selected degradation products. Pharmacological activity of photodegradation product (UV4), which is known as active metabolite, was qualified and identified. Two other degradation compounds (Ox1 and N1), which were formed during degradation process, were found to be pharmacologically active.