Asian Journal
Of Traditional Medicines

Abstract: Natural products play a more and more vital role in the discovery of new drug molecules and they are also used for the development of novel anticancer drugs. Literature review shows that the samara of Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle may possess strong inhibitory efficacy against various types of cancer cells. Therefore a study was carried out to identify selective anticancer agents from the samara. In this report, we employed a docking weighted network pharmacological approach to understand the anticancer potentiality of the samara of Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle. against six types of cancers. And three compounds with different structure types, namely 1-O-β-D glucopyranosyl-(2S,3R,4E,9E)-2-(2'R hydroxyhexadecenoylamino)-4,9-octadecadiene-l,3-diol (FO45), quercetin 3-O-β-D-glucopyranoside (FF39), 6α-hydroxystigmast-4-en-3-one (FS5), were predicted to have potential activities for cancer target proteins. FO45 was found to have maximum interactions with 45 liver cancer targets in terms of docking weighted network pharmacological analysis. We believe that our present study may provide important clues for finding novel lead compounds for cancer.

Key words: the samara of Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle, network pharmacology, anticancer activity