Uncovering the Therapeutic Potential of Panchavalkala: An in silico Approach on Cervical Cancer

Background

Among all cancer that affect women worldwide, cervical cancer ranks third behind colorectal and breast cancer, with 5,69,000 new cases reported each year, that requires novel therapeutic strategies in addition to Holistic treatments.

Objectives

In Ayurveda, the Panchavalkala is used for wound healing activity and studies have proven that it is effective in Cytotoxic activity. Hence, using bioinformatics, this study uncovers the role of Panchavalkala, to assess the mode of action in Cervical cancer.

Materials and Methods

Panchavalkala's phytochemicals were procured from databases. Absorption, Metabolism, Distribution, Excretion and Toxicity screening of the phytochemicals were done. Targets related to plants and disease were obtained and overlapping targets were found. Common targets were used to predict KEGG pathways and topological analysis was done. Docking was done with the phytochemical having highest degree and hub genes and binding affinity was calculated.

Results

124 overlapping targets, 10 pathways and 18 phytochemicals were obtained by performing topological analysis. Corosolic acid had highest binding affinity towards AKT1 with -12.1 kcal/mol as binding affinity. Pathways in cancer had 50 common targets and had highest count in the KEGG pathways.

Conclusion

Panchavalakala is told as Cytoprotective, but its mechanism of action was inconclusive, with in silico analysis the preliminary mechanism was justified. Further pre-clinical and clinical assessment is required to consider the phytochemical and the combination as a first line treatment in cervical cancer.