Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Med.

Sec. Translational Medicine

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1584411

This article is part of the Research Topic Exploring Adverse Drug Reactions: Monitoring, Mechanism, Intervention, and Resolution View all articles

Analysis and prediction of immune cell infiltration characteristics in COPD: Folium isatidis and its active ingredients are able to combat lung lesions caused by COPD by correcting immune cell infiltration

Provisionally accepted
Faqin Wang Faqin Wang Weichen Zhang Weichen Zhang Yujie Huang Yujie Huang Xianbang Hou Xianbang Hou Huiqin Xu Huiqin Xu Liwei He Liwei He *
  • Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Objective: As a respiratory disease, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has become a common fatal disease worldwide. We aimed to screen active traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) for the treatment of COPD by COPD-related transcriptome gene chip analysis and verify their therapeutic activity for COPD.We used bioinformatics analysis to predict potential therapeutic TCMs based on the immune cell infiltration characteristics in COPD. Further, BALB/c female mice were divided into different treatment groups to investigate the effect of indirubin (IDR) and FI on COPD.After 15 days of intranasal lipopolysaccharide instillation and passive smoking, we started giving drug treatment to mice, including distilled water (control and model groups), dexamethasone, IDR and FI. The lung function, visceral index, degree of lung tissue damage, and immune cell infiltration were assessed.We identified 109 differential genes, 22 immune cells, and 50 TCMs associated with the alleviation of COPD. The in vivo experimental results showed that IDR and FI had protective effects against lung injury in mice and could inhibit COPD. The mechanism of this effect may be related to their ability to regulate the proportion and distribution of immune infiltration of B lymphocytes, CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes, NK cells, macrophages, neutrophils, and eosinophils.regulating immune cell infiltration. This offers an experimental groundwork for delving deeper into the mechanisms through which TCMs impact COPD treatment and for identifying possible therapeutic drugs for COPD.

    Keywords: Immune infiltration, Pulmonary Function, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Network Pharmacology, Indirubin

    Received: 27 Feb 2025; Accepted: 31 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Zhang, Huang, Hou, Xu and He. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Liwei He, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

    Research integrity at Frontiers

    Man ultramarathon runner in the mountains he trains at sunset

    95% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or good

    Learn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish.


    Find out more